


don’t go away again, I wanna be more than a story to tell your friends

by suzukiblu



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Actual Product May Vary Due To Product Enhancement, Alpha Peggy Carter, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, De-Aged Peggy Carter, Do As Peggy Says, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, F/M, Fantasy Gender Roles, Female Alphas Fuck Yeah, Fisting, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Dehumanization, Knotting, M/M, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Mental Instability, Multi, Omega Bucky Barnes, Omega Steve Rogers, Oral Sex, Performance Issues, Praise Kink, Pre-Ant-Man, References To Past Rape/Noncon, Rimming, Steve Rogers Is (Partially) A Virgin, Underwear Kink, Unsafe Sex, Voyeurism, post-AoU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-16
Updated: 2015-10-16
Packaged: 2018-04-26 14:35:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5008486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suzukiblu/pseuds/suzukiblu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You look just the same,” Steve says, sounding wondering and nauseous all at once. Considering the <i>last</i> person who looked just the same . . . well, Peggy doesn’t much blame him. </p><p>“I’m quite sure I’m not,” she replies anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	don’t go away again, I wanna be more than a story to tell your friends

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fantasaria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fantasaria/gifts).



> Written for [fantasaria](http://fantasaria.tumblr.com/), who wanted alpha!Peggy with omega!Steve and omega!Bucky with one or both of them in heat. Hurt/comfort, praise kink, and a happy ending were the only given guidelines; everything else I got to decide. Therefore, I went with a different setup than I’m used to seeing in Steve/Peggy/Bucky, because I like to make things hard for myself, I guess? 
> 
> For the record, this was supposed to be a timed fic. That . . . is not what happened. Basically I have wanted to write ABO Steve/Peggy/Bucky FOREVER and was therefore so busy enjoying myself rolling around in the concept that when my time limit was up porn still hadn’t happened. And I imagine you can all extrapolate my decision-making process from there. 
> 
> Anyway that’s why this fic is like 30k, sorry/notsorry. :X

According to Steve, it’s Barnes’s first heat since SHIELD came extremely literally crashing down and he stopped getting forcibly injected with narcotic-grade HYDRA-issue suppressants. It took this long for the backup doses in the arm to run out, apparently. As for Peggy, it’s her first true rut since Gabe went into menopause. 

At least, it’s _going_ to be--it’s been a long time, but nothing else but an oncoming rut could explain the wild and restless feeling that she’d woken up to, the eager flush of heat under her skin and the urgent rush of strength in her body. 

Not that this is precisely her body. 

“You look just the same,” Steve says, sounding wondering and nauseous all at once. Considering the _last_ person who looked just the same . . . well, she doesn’t much blame him. 

“I’m quite sure I’m not,” she replies anyway, although she’s looking at her hands as she says it. They’re young and strong and haven’t looked like this since before Howard and Maria mated. She’s not sure they looked this young during the _war_. 

She’s not sure she ever looked this young in her life. 

Something crashes down the hall and Peggy glances up. Steve’s mouth is thin and tight, little lines of stress dug in around his eyes. He didn’t have those lines before, some part of her tries to think. But he doesn’t look a day older than the first time he stepped out of Howard’s machine, either. 

Then again, how would she know? It’s been a long, long time, and even with the disorienting clarity currently upon her, her memory hasn’t been the best for more than a few years of it--to say nothing of the various head injuries of her youth. Her memories of Steve Rogers are just as colored by the old newsreels and photos as anyone else’s. Colored a little differently because of that one _particular_ photo, perhaps, but colored all the same. 

“What’s his status?” she asks, and Steve tenses. 

“You don’t have to--” 

“Really, Rogers, is now the time?” she retorts shortly, eyes narrowing at him. 

“You _don’t_ ,” Steve says, voice even but tight. He’s the one looking at her hands this time. “I think Wanda and the Vision did it. I said--I told them you were his designated emergency partner. He put you down, during the war. Do you . . .” 

“I remember,” Peggy replies curtly. She remembers quite a lot, just now. “I find it rather hard to believe _he_ does, but I do.” That--that had not been something she’d been able to forget. Not yet, at least. Barnes hadn’t been able to put down Steve for it, of course, and they’d liked each other well enough. Both of them had liked Steve more, obviously, but so had the entire Army. 

Theirs, obviously. Not so many of the other ones. 

“What _does_ he remember?” she asks. She’d been Steve’s emergency heat partner too, once. It’d never mattered--neither his nor Barnes’s suppressants had ever failed--but it’d been there on paper all the same, black and white and following her through everything. A tiny footnote in history turned into some great romantic affair, although of course everyone had ignored Barnes in it unless they’d been calling him a slattern or implying he’d had designs on stealing Captain America’s alpha. 

As if she’d ever truly been that. 

“I don’t know,” Steve says, expression still tight. “He showed up on Sam’s porch like that and hasn’t said a damn thing to anyone but him. Tried to stab Natasha once, but that’s about it. Ignores me completely. It’s like--he has good times and bad ones, he’s not always--” 

“Yes. I know what it’s like,” Peggy cuts in shortly, flexing her hands. They’re no less young. Her nails are painted like they haven’t been steady enough to do for herself since her early seventies, her hair’s pinned up for the first time in years, and she’s wearing a garishly patriotic pantsuit that she presumes to be a modern omega and newborn null’s best attempt at forties-era English alpha fashion. Or--no, God, it’s the outfit from the damn _cartoon_ , isn’t it. 

_God_. 

“Fine,” she says, adjusting her horrendous lapels. There’s work to do, after all. And the sooner she gets out of this damn disaster of an outfit the better, frankly. She’d always dressed like a woman and not just an alpha for a _reason_ , and she doesn’t much appreciate the change. “He’s asked for an alpha, then?” 

“Sam says so,” Steve says quietly, glancing down the hall. Three words should not be able to sound so sad, Peggy thinks, but of course she’s heard worse. _Just be there_ and _Steve Rogers’s blood_ and _He’s gone, Director_ being the least of them, some days. 

“Very well,” she says, and heads towards Barnes’s room. She hasn’t seen him yet--has hardly a clue what he looks like these days. There was security footage from the helicarrier and cell phone videos from the bridge, but not much else; certainly no clear shots or close-ups. He’d worn black body armor and had long hair, and his arm had shone metallic in the light. 

He’d hurt Steve, who is only very slowly following her. She imagines he would not be here at all if not for the chance Barnes will take one look at her and try to kill her. 

He’d most likely succeed, given the circumstances. Even in this borrowed body, red-lipped and rut-ready, Peggy wouldn’t stand much of a chance. She might’ve had some hope in her prime, when her instincts and reflexes had been attuned to it, but now--no. Not now. 

It hardly matters, though. She’d just be seeing Gabe again in that case. 

And she’s been counting down to that for a while now. 

The door to Barnes’s room is open, with no sign of whatever made the crashing sound before. Peggy doesn’t smell his pheromones until she’s nearly upon it, though, and realizes why rather quickly--there’s a sickening chemical dampening effect tainting them and making them seem weak and unhealthy, nothing about them remotely attractive to her alpha senses. Apparently the drugs aren’t fully out of his system, then. 

At least they won’t have to worry about him being fertile, heat or not. Small favors, she thinks. 

She doesn’t see him in the room. Steve makes an alarmed noise and just barely restrains himself from darting forward; Peggy crouches, and spots Barnes on the floor on the far side of the large medical-grade heat bed that dominates the room, close against the wall with his arms wrapped over his head. His hospital gown is soaked with sweat and his skin is this close to dripping with it, pale naked legs curled up tight and body trembling. 

“Barnes,” she says, and his eyes snap open. He stares through her. 

He stares _at_ her. 

“Carter,” he chokes, and then darts forward just enough to grab her by the arm and yank her under the bed. Steve curses and Peggy grunts in pain at various impacts where her body hits against linoleum and metal, instinctive panic flaring up--she’s weak, she’s brittle, she’ll break apart, she’ll never walk _again_ \--

Barnes buries his face in her young, strong shoulder and lets out a breath of a whine, and Peggy can smell his pheromones now. She puts a hand out from under the bed just in time to stop Steve from snatching the whole thing off the floor and most likely tossing it into a wall, knowing him. Omegas are dramatic like that. Steve is _especially_ dramatic like that. 

“Status report, soldier,” she says briskly. The phrasing’s unfortunate, perhaps, but it’s the way she’d always talked to Barnes before. He lets out a pained, cracked sound and drags her out to his own side of the floor with sweaty, trembling hands; she rearranges herself so they lay side by side and he pushes in tight against her. His cock bumps awkwardly against her hip and he chokes; Peggy puts a hand on the back of his head. His hair’s soaked through. 

In this close, he could crack her neck without even trying. It wouldn’t even need to be the metal arm. 

_“Soldier,”_ she repeats, sharper. “Status report.” 

“Don’t feel right,” Barnes says, gulping for air. His shoulders are hunched up so tight it looks painful, and Peggy lays a hand on his back between them. None of his tension lessens, but his eyes flick to her and--shift. 

She recognizes the shift. She’s never seen it on her own face, of course, but she wasn’t the only patient in the hospice. 

_“The asset’s functionality is compromised,”_ Barnes says in toneless Russian, face not quite blank but certainly empty all the same; the pained noise Steve makes is so quiet that Peggy doubts she’d have been able to hear it with her normal ears. Frankly she’s surprised to catch it at all. She wonders if he’s learned Russian or if he’s just responding to the emotionlessness in Barnes’s voice. 

Barnes’s accent is perfect, she notes, which is--strange. HYDRA’s dumped files included recordings of him speaking on the bridge, and his Russian was frankly _appalling_ there; Dottie would’ve laughed her head off. And then likely shot him. 

_“Describe the asset’s malfunctions,”_ Peggy says in slightly less perfect Russian, because there are more immediate concerns at the moment. She knows better than to challenge a slip like this anyway. 

Hopefully Barnes is more merciful than Dottie, so far as accents go. 

_“The asset’s temperature is unreasonably high. Its respiration and heart rate are elevated. Its sexual organs are in an unauthorized state of physical arousal,”_ Barnes says, voice dull enough to sound by rote, and then the flat look in his eyes flickers just enough to turn uncertain and his accent suddenly isn’t so perfect after all. _“It is--it is experiencing--”_

 _“Experiencing?”_ Peggy presses, and Barnes’s mismatched shoulders tighten again. 

“Where’s the mission?” he demands roughly, shoving back from her and hitting the wall, his eyes suddenly wide and wild. “Where’s my friend?!” 

“Behind the bed,” Peggy answers calmly, because of course there is no other person Barnes could mean but Steve. She can’t help noticing Steve didn’t try to answer himself, though. “He brought me to help.” 

“I don’t need help,” Barnes says, but there’s a sudden hungry look in those wild eyes and he’s leaning back in without even checking to confirm that Steve is there. “Help what? Fix me?” 

“Do you need fixed?” Peggy asks, tilting her head. He might, she supposes. He might also just be slipping due to the stress of his first heat after so long. Or perhaps he’s only getting worse, and worse, and--

“I don’t!” Barnes snaps, eyes flaring and teeth baring. He looks so _wild_. So lost. “I’m functional!” 

“Very well,” Peggy replies, watching him carefully. She can’t tell if he’s settling into this mindset or about to shift into another. “What did he bring me for, then?” 

Barnes’s expression flickers in confusion at the question but almost immediately goes hungry and restless again. He grips the front of her horrendous lapels and sniffs sharply at her neck. His pheromones still smell unhealthy and unpleasant, but Peggy expects her own are in the best state they’ve been in decades. She wasn’t exaggerating about the rut she can feel coming on, for one. 

Barnes gets a good whiff of said oncoming rut, and his eyes go dark and hot. 

“For me,” he purrs, pressing in greedily and pulling at her jacket, throwing a long bare thigh over her hip. She hears Steve inhale, but again he says nothing. “He got you for me. He’s my friend, so he got you for me.” 

“Quite right,” Peggy agrees, and helps him get the dreadful jacket off to the best of her ability in the cramped space behind the bed. Bumps and bruises are involved, but who gives a damn? The body’s young enough to take it; whoever made the thing made sure of that. 

She’d forgotten how well she’d used to be able to take the bumps and bruises, actually. 

“You’re wearing too much,” Barnes says, fumbling impatiently at the buttons of her shirt. The organic fingers are slick with sweat, and the metal ones aren’t quite delicate enough to catch the buttons. Peggy provides the necessary assistance with her free hand and lets Barnes occupy himself with rubbing his face into the pulse at her throat and breathing in deep. 

“There you are, soldier,” she hums, sliding her hand up his back. He pushes his overheated face tighter into her throat, cock twitching against her hip, and she drops her other hand down to cup it through the cheap medical-issue underwear. He’s wearing modern-cut panties, which is--strange, some disconnected part of her can’t help but think. But no stranger than the horrible slacks she’s in right now, she supposes. 

Barnes moans at the touch of her hand, and Peggy hears Steve shift on the other side of the bed. For a brief moment she almost expects him to move it after all, but he still doesn’t even speak. She presses her mouth to Barnes’s flushed temple in a perfunctory moment of affection, and he moans twice as loud as he did for her hand.

Steve--inhales. 

“Yeah. Here I am,” Barnes manages in belated and breathless response before giving her a smirk, and Peggy lets out an amused huff, but nothing more than that. He’s not quite the boy he was, and she is certainly not the girl she was, but she’s seen that quick and dirty smirk on him before. 

“Yes, you are,” she agrees, lifting both hands to cup his pecs. He pushes his chest into the contact with a little sigh that turns heated as she flicks a nail across one of his nipples, and she watches him bite his own smirk out of shape when she does it again. 

If she’d ever done something so fruitless as asking for her youth back, it would’ve been to finally deal HYDRA that damn finishing blow--the real one, the _last_ one. Not one to be recovered from. Getting it back unasked for to take care of an omega in need, to soothe a long-lost ally who never needed this when it would’ve been simple . . . 

Well. It’s still simple, she supposes. And it suits. 

It has so often been that she could only take care of people by lying to someone. 

Barnes’s little noises turn eager as Peggy rubs her thumbs over his nipples and slips a thigh between his legs to press up against him. He hitches his leg higher over her hip with a quiet whine and she pinches his nipples through the hospital gown before tugging tightly at them. Barnes starts panting, his head dropping to her shoulder and fingers digging in against her back. With any luck, the metal one will ruin the atrocious shirt. 

“Aren’t you as lovely as ever,” Peggy murmurs, and Barnes lifts his head just enough to glance up at her, shuddering as she rubs her thigh up tighter against him. 

“We did this--before?” he manages, eyes flickering uncertainly. “You were there before. You--but you’re too young.” 

“I am and I was,” Peggy confirms, pressing her lips against his temple briefly. “But no, we never did.” Barnes relaxes a little at that, and she spares a moment to wonder why but doesn’t pursue the thought--because he thinks he’d measure up poorly to her memory, because he’s relieved not to be missing a memory of his own, because any number of reasons that are his and not hers to be privy to, unless he decides to tell her. 

“Okay,” he says, and doesn’t ask any other questions. She wonders if that can really be enough for him, but then again, the man’s taken stranger things in stride. 

“Shall we adjourn to the mattress?” she suggests, giving his pecs a last gentle squeeze before smoothing her hands up to his shoulders. She wants to be able to see Steve again--more of him than a glimpse of his boots if she cranes her neck, she means. Barnes is the one in heat, of course, and the obvious priority, just . . . she would prefer to be able to see Steve, if necessary. 

If he’d said a single thing since they’d stepped into this room she might be less concerned about that, but he _hasn’t_ said a single thing since they stepped into this room. 

“Yeah. Okay,” Barnes says, but hides his face against her shoulder again and doesn’t make any motion to get up. Peggy strokes a hand down his back and considers, briefly, that Barnes may not want to be seen himself. He isn’t protesting, though, so after a moment she pulls herself up against the side of the bed carefully, and he pushes himself up to match her. She stands up. 

He doesn’t. 

“Ah,” Peggy says, eyes just barely widening as Barnes wraps an arm around the back of her thighs and rubs his face against her clit through the fabric of the awful slacks. She’s barely half-hard, but the contact seems likely to remedy that. She can’t tell if he’s scenting her or trying to get _himself_ scented, though. 

If he keeps up like this he’s going to get himself _marked_. 

“Come here,” she says, tugging on his shoulder, and Barnes unfolds upwards, the arm across her thighs tightening and taking her right off her feet. Peggy makes an offended noise-- _she’s_ the alpha here--and ducks just in time to avoid knocking her head against the ceiling, and he laughs. She’s afraid, because she still feels like if he drops her she’ll shatter, smash apart and never heal, but his laugh is weak and uncertain and a little afraid too, so . . . so. 

So. 

“The _mattress_ , Barnes,” she reminds him pointedly, tipping her weight forward in his arms like she’s not afraid of breaking apart at all. She won’t. This is not a mistimed memory, not a flashback, not a hallucination--she won’t break apart if she falls. Barnes drops back with her weight like he couldn’t hold three of her effortlessly and sits down on the edge of the bed, legs spread to let her kneel between them and another hot pheromone rush rising as soon as she settles. 

He glances back at Steve in the process, but only through the fall of his hair as Peggy wraps an arm around his neck. She doubts Steve himself sees it. 

“That’s a little more like what I had in mind, yes,” she says, dropping a kiss against his temple. Barnes shudders, pushing his face into her chest, and she tugs apart the last few buttons of her shirt to let him get his hands inside it and skimming tight over her ribs. The metal one’s only room temperature, which feels a little strange, but not as strange as the fact it’s a modern push-up bra under the shirt. She’d been able to tell before, obviously, but the sight is still almost enough to make her laugh. What are they teaching the kids these days, anyway? 

Barnes mouthing at her chest distracts her from that line of thought, and she pushes a hand into his hair to encourage the behavior and glances up to check on Steve. He’s still behind Barnes, just standing there several steps back from the bed, stiff and tense like he’s lined up for an inspection he already knows he’ll fail. Close enough to intervene if it were needed, but no closer than that. 

It seems like the Steve sort of thing to do, Peggy thinks. She just wishes she knew if he was only here to make sure they don’t hurt each other or if he’s stayed because he _wants_ to be here. He wanted her for his emergency partner once; wanted Barnes for _Barnes_ , once. Maybe even wanted her for herself, possibly, although they’d never quite made any promises either way. 

There’s no way to know what he wants now without asking, though, and that’s something she should’ve done before walking into a room with his heated-up best friend. 

But Barnes snuck that little glance at him, and she’s just done the same herself, so . . . 

“Would you mind coming over here, Steve?” she asks as she tugs gently at the back of Barnes’s hair, tone light and easy like the question isn’t--could never be. Barnes’s fingers dig in tighter against her ribs and he hides his face against her chest on another shudder, and Steve hesitates for one long moment that makes her nauseous, that makes her feel every one of her years but still too young and too foolish at the same time. 

Then he comes over. 

“You alright, Buck?” he asks Barnes, coming around the end of the bed to stand close to the edge of the mattress but not touching either of them. Barnes looks up with a vague, distant look in his eyes. 

_“The asset’s functionality is compromised,”_ he says listlessly. Steve’s mouth tightens painfully. Peggy still can’t tell if he understands Russian. He knew a few words, back in the day, but not enough to converse. 

_“The asset is compromised within acceptable parameters,”_ she puts in briskly, and Barnes’s expression flickers, uncertain. 

_“‘Acceptable parameters’,”_ he repeats, back to that atrocious accent, and Peggy strokes a hand through his hair. 

_“Yes,”_ she says, kissing his temple again. The contact makes him shudder harder and hesitantly push his head into her hand, and she curls her nails to scratch gently in encouragement. _“Very good.”_

_“‘Good’,”_ Barnes repeats, barely a mutter, and then re-buries his face against her chest. He grips the back of her unbuttoned shirt and Peggy runs her hands through his hair and down his back as he pulls her in tighter against him. Her clit presses into his stomach, just hard enough to make the point, and he inhales roughly. Something changes in his posture, although she can’t identify quite what from this close, and when he lifts his head again the wildness is back in his face. 

“There you are,” she murmurs, stroking his cheek; he pushes right into the touch, breathing ragged. It’s not quite Barnes, this part of him, but she thinks it’s the _realest_ part of him. Or at least for now it is. “You remember what we’re doing?” 

“He’s my friend,” Barnes says, voice a little raspy and eyes not quite making it over to Steve. “And you’re for me.” 

“That’s right,” Peggy hums, smoothing his hair back from his face so that the attempt at looking at Steve, at least, won’t go unnoticed this time. “Is that what you want?” 

“Carter,” Barnes chokes out as his face crumples, his voice _much_ raspier this time and nearly cracking on her name. “Don’t--c’mon, don’t fucking _tease_.” 

“Never,” Peggy promises immediately, cupping his wrecked face in her hands and trying not to let how deep that look on his face and that flash of imperfect clarity just cut her show. It wouldn’t help. “May I quell your heat?” 

“I said don’t _tease_ ,” Barnes says pleadingly, digging his fingers into her back. Peggy bites the corner of his jaw sharply, digging her nails in just enough to prick against the back of his neck, and the shaken sigh he lets out is more relief than arousal. 

“You know I wouldn’t bring you anybody who wasn’t gonna take care of you,” Steve says, voice quiet, and Barnes swallows roughly. 

“I--Steve, I--” Barnes cuts himself off, visibly struggling. The gut-punched look on Steve’s face just from hearing his name in Barnes’s mouth would be justification enough to kill every HYDRA agent who ever lived, even if Peggy didn’t know a damn thing about the organization past that. “Don’t leave me,” he says finally, and the look on Steve’s face gets even worse. 

“Of course he won’t,” Peggy says firmly, ignoring the cracked, crushed feeling in her chest to squeeze the back of Barnes’s neck. She can see it just fine on Steve’s face, anyway. “We’ll _both_ take care of you.” Barnes shudders, nodding jerkily, and Steve’s expression is miserable for all of a heartbeat before he’s nodding too. 

“We will,” he swears, putting a hand on the small of Barnes’s back. Barnes buries a quiet noise in Peggy’s shoulder and she gives his neck another reassuring squeeze. Steve moves to sit down on the bed behind Barnes and leans back against the head of it, and Peggy immediately recognizes what he’s doing. He makes his body a cradle and bed for Barnes, who stays stiff and strung wire-tight right up until Peggy gives his shoulders a light push, at which point he practically collapses backwards and lets Steve pull him into his arms. 

They fit together well. Peggy is entirely unsurprised. 

“Comfortable?” she asks, tucking her hair back behind her ear as she leans over them. Barnes looks like he doesn’t know the meaning of the word, and also like he’d kill anyone who tried to make him move. That’s the closest thing to a “yes” Peggy expects, but she’s pleasantly surprised when he nods. It’s uncertain, a little, but it’s absolutely a nod. “May I touch you?” 

_“Please,”_ Barnes begs, his head falling back against Steve’s shoulder. Steve’s hand tightens on his hip and Barnes shudders again, eyes screwed shut tight. They look lovely together, but the edge of distress in both their expressions makes it hard for Peggy to think of much but how badly she wants to hurt the people responsible for it. 

But that’s not what she was given this body for. 

“Aren’t you the sweetest omega,” she murmurs, pushing the hospital gown up over Barnes’s hips and hooking her fingers in the waistband of his panties. He lifts his hips the moment she tugs and she pulls the panties down his trembling thighs, a little surprised to find how thoroughly his slick has soaked them. His pheromones are still weak and chemical-sick, and it hadn’t occurred to her that he might be responding more than they implied. 

She hopes it’s because he wants her to touch him, and not just because his body is trying so desperately to ripen despite the abuses it’s suffered. 

She tugs his underwear off entirely and glances at it unthinkingly, a little overwhelmed by how much a little scrap of wet white cotton can affect her. It’s been a long, long time. 

Such a long time. 

Peggy inhales, and smells the sick but urgent pheromones of an ally in need; a not-quite friend who likely would’ve been with her in the SSR and for the start of SHIELD after the war, if he’d been able to make the choice. Or who would’ve gone down with Steve, slept into the new century, fought aliens in New York and pirates at sea and HYDRA in Washington and miracles and monsters in Sovokia and--

It’s too much, suddenly. Her head’s too clear, too full, too _sharp_. She’d gotten used to the mud and mire and the sad looks, to being frail and too old and weak to take care of an omega, much less quell one’s heat. 

This is what some stupid children cursed her with goddamn _youth_ for. 

Peggy breathes out, and lets nothing else in. She presses a kiss to the soaked crotch of the panties in her hand, lipstick leaving a perfect red stain against the fabric, and Steve nearly chokes. Barnes outright _whimpers_. Peggy makes herself smile at both of them, just for a moment, and then drops the underwear off the side of the bed. Both omegas’ eyes follow it. 

Barnes spread his knees the second she put her mouth against the fabric. She’s not sure he noticed. 

“I’d like to kiss you now,” she tells him quietly, putting a hand on the inside of his thigh. His knees drop even farther apart and he nods roughly, eyes wild as she’s ever seen them. 

He’s beautiful, of course. 

Just the same, and just like she remembers. 

“Thank you,” she says, sparing him one moment’s worth of a smile before dropping her mouth to kiss down the length of his thigh. Barnes reacts immediately and violently, nearly knocking his head into Steve’s, and Steve grips him tight to keep him steady. Barnes grabs the back of Steve’s hands where they dig in against his own body and _sobs_. 

“Carter, Carter, Carter _please_ , Carter--” he pleads, and she bites down. _“Fuck!”_

Peggy kisses the marks her teeth left, nothing like the marks her lipstick does, and Barnes and Steve’s fingers both flex roughly against his stomach. She can still smell Barnes’s pheromones, but in this close it’s _Steve’s_ scent filling up her lungs and fattening up her clit. It’s been a long time since an omega turned her head in any way but mild passing interest, but if anyone could manage it again of course it would be Steve. 

Of course. 

Is his body reacting inside that bulky, unfamiliar uniform, she wonders; is he hard against his cup and soft and wet inside, warm and needy for a knot, wanting and--

She breathes out again, Barnes’s leg jumping at the warm puff of air against his damp thigh, and reminds herself what she’s here for. What Barnes needs, and more importantly _deserves_. Then she puts her mouth where he wants it, and his body jerks back into Steve’s. Peggy wraps her hands around his strong, shaking thighs and drags her tongue over his hole. He sobs, and she does it again. He _sobs_. 

“We got you, Buck,” Steve murmurs roughly, tightening his arms around Barnes’s stomach. “You good?” 

“Yes, yes, I'll be good, sir," Barnes chokes desperately, yanking his hands off Steve's like they're on fire and flattening them against the sheets instead. A distant part of Peggy bares her teeth and bleeds something hot and hateful up her spine. Steve--Steve just exhales. 

"Good soldier," he says with truly impressive evenness, not changing his grip on Barnes’s body at all. Peggy would admire his restraint if she weren't lit up white-hot with rage. 

"Yes," she agrees much less evenly, teeth bared and nails dug deep into Barnes's thighs. "Good soldier.” 

She puts her mouth back between his legs and eats him out like his slick tastes like ambrosia, like there’s no trace of poison in his pheromones, like he _deserves_ , and Barnes presses back tight against Steve’s body and keens through his teeth. She drags her tongue over his hole and his hands fist in the sheets; she pushes her tongue _inside_ him and his hips lift off the bed. 

She touches him, and he looks hurt and lovely and desperate for the contact. 

“There you go, that’s right, you’re doing great,” Steve is murmuring the whole while, his big beautiful hands stroking down Barnes’s stomach, over his chest, up to his neck. Peggy has never seen anyone cradle someone else’s _throat_ , but Steve Rogers manages it. “Just like that, that’s just right. You’re doing so good.” 

“Sir,” Barnes says, breathless but neutral, and then not a second later sobs, _“Steve!”_

Steve winces, very faintly, and Peggy drags her nails roughly down Barnes’s thighs and puts everything she has into tongue-fucking the words right out of him. He whimpers, he moans, he _cries_ , and she is merciless and so is Steve, in his own way, Steve who holds onto him through all of it and keeps him steady as he shakes apart; Steve who kisses him and lets the strangled noises Barnes can’t seem to help spill into his own mouth as the other kisses back, clumsy and over-eager and like maybe he doesn’t quite remember how it’s supposed to go. Steve matches him, though, only barely better at the kissing, and they melt so obviously for each other that Peggy nearly loses her breath. 

Nothing has ever made her want to den down with a pair of omegas quite so much. If she has anything to say about it, none of them will leave this room until Steve and Barnes both remember --or learn--how to kiss like their lives depend on it. 

“Please,” Barnes manages to beg in the space between their mouths, voice breathy and broken, “please, please, I’m so--I need, I _want_ \--” 

He doesn’t finish the sentence, struggling for the words, but they don’t make him wait. Steve wraps one of those gorgeous hands around Barnes’s pretty cock and Peggy slips a finger inside his even prettier hole on the next curl of her tongue and Barnes goes over the edge just like that, caught tight between them and just shy of sobbing. His come spills over Steve’s knuckles and the back of his hand and his slick soaks Peggy’s lipsticked mouth and drips down over her jaw and throat. Maybe Steve will cradle hers too, she thinks, fingers lifting to touch. 

Barnes is still lovely. Even lovelier now, trembling and weak and collapsed back against Steve. HYDRA saw him weak too, the cold and distant part of Peggy that can’t be allowed to touch this remembers, and they used it to tear him apart. 

But this is not the time to dwell on that. 

“Very well done, soldier,” she rumbles approvingly, then makes a show of wiping the pad of her thumb across the slick smeared on her face and sticking it into her mouth. It tastes chemical and terrible. It tastes natural and _wonderful_. Steve ducks his head for a moment and Barnes shivers all the way up his spine, fisting his hands in the sheets again with an intent, wild-edged stare. 

“C’mere,” he rasps, and of course she gives him what he wants, sliding up his body and into easy reach. Barnes puts a hand on her jaw and cranes his neck to lick clumsily at her wet mouth, the motion sweetly awkward and gut-clutchingly, mind-numbingly _glorious_. If his pheromones were even slightly healthy she’s fairly certain she’d be blowing her knot all over his stomach right now. 

“Did you like that?” she asks him, stroking a hand down the side of his neck as his tongue drags over her slick-sticky pulse. She’ll smell like him for days, no matter how she scrubs. 

“Knot me,” he pleads in response, reaching down to tug her slacks open and pulling up a shaking thigh to make himself available. Peggy could drop her hips a few inches and slide right in. 

And that’s what he’s asking for, so she does. Barnes buries his face in her shoulder with a sharp little cry and goes so tight it takes her breath away. He was quieter _orgasming_. Steve readjusts his grip on him to keep him stable, staring up at her with bright eyes and a barely-open mouth, something like awe and something like grief in his expression. Peggy meets those eyes for a moment and imagines that they are in some shoddy SSR-sanctioned excuse for a heat-tent and that once Barnes is sated Steve will be rolling onto his stomach to present for her too, uniform pants tugged down and wet, needy hole pleading for this same treatment, this same attention. 

Then she closes her eyes and does her duty to Barnes. She fucks him with her clit as steady and determined as she did with her tongue, picking a metronome-merciless rhythm and sticking to it. Barnes wraps his legs around her waist on the first thrust and his nails scratch up her back from the start, which she doesn’t blame him for--he must be shockingly over-sensitive, even with a heat-enhanced refractory period. _Especially_ with a heat-enhanced refractory period, to say nothing of the super-soldier one. 

Every noise he makes in her ear is him pleading for more, though, so that’s what she gives him. 

“Carter, Carter, please, your clit’s so good, Carter, _please_!” Barnes begs as she fucks him harder, loud and messy and lovely, greedy and _gorgeous_ , and Peggy snarls back in arousal and approval that makes him cry out even louder on the next snap of her hips, and louder, and louder, and _louder_ \-- 

One of Steve’s hands moves to cover one of hers on the bed, and their fingers interlace as naturally as if they’ve done it a thousand times. 

As if they’ve ever done it at all. 

“Peggy,” he says quietly, eyes soft and strong and sad; just how she’d always pictured them looking when she’d been trying not to picture the plane crash. 

She comes so hard she sees _galaxies_. 

She collapses; Barnes whimpers. Steve murmurs something soothing to one or the other of them, she can’t tell. She’d be shocked to meet the alpha who _could_. 

She comes out of the haze of stars filling up her head slowly, vaguely, and can’t quite place the problem or the strange unsettled feeling that’s cutting into low-level pleasure still vibrating through her body. Barnes is still whimpering. 

Barnes is whimpering in _distress_ , Peggy realizes, horror slashing through that hazy pleasure like a bucket of ice water and jerking her up off him. His expression looks agonized and for a second she doesn’t understand what she’s done wrong, how she hurt him so much without realizing. He makes a wounded, despairing noise and hides his face behind his hands, and she still doesn’t understand. 

And then her hips shift, and her clit slips out of him. 

. . . she didn’t knot. 

“Oh,” Peggy manages, numb with shock. They built her a goddamn miracle of magic and science for a body and pushed it into sympathetic rut but didn’t think to fix the damn _ED_ , she thinks hysterically, what kind of goddamn stupid goddamn _children_ \--

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it I’ll be good I’ll do better I’m _sorry_ ,” Barnes is gasping out, his voice cracked and shaking, and Peggy gives Steve a panicked look and gets one right back. 

“I didn’t--I’m _old_ , Steve!” she reminds him desperately over Barnes’s whimpered apologies, a breath away from either laughing or screaming at how awful the sound of them is, and Steve just shakes his head helplessly and squeezes his arms tighter across Barnes’s shaking shoulders. 

“Buck, no, you’re all right, you didn’t do anything wrong,” he tries to insist, but Barnes is a breath from hyperventilating and doesn’t seem to hear him. Peggy feels like she might be sick. She’s an alpha, but she’s not a fool. There are very few things as upsetting for a heated-up omega as their alpha just _not knotting_ them, and for an already _unstable_ one . . . 

Even Gabe had had trouble handling it when she’d started having performance issues, and Gabe had been her damn _mate_ , an independent and stable sixty year-old omega with her wedding ring on his finger and her bond-bite on his neck. Barnes . . . Barnes is not any of those things, and has nothing that could make up for them either. Even Steve’s arms around him don’t seem to be any comfort. 

_Why_ can’t she have the damn serum, Peggy thinks for genuinely the first time in her life; if she had that same nonexistant refractory period she could be inside him again right now, getting Steve to help her pin him down so he felt safe and protected, so he knew someone strong enough had his back while he was vulnerable, so her fucking useless clit could fucking _work_ this time. 

“Bucky, it’s not _you_ , your pheromones just--” Steve cuts himself off like he realizes just what a terrible idea finishing that sentence would probably be, but Peggy stills. She hadn’t thought of it, still stuck in the memory of her real body’s flaws, but maybe the kids didn’t fuck up; maybe the chemical strangeness to Barnes’s pheromones really is interfering. Maybe--

“Barnes,” she says, putting a hand on Barnes’s flank, and he tenses--at the contact? At the name? Who knows. “Look at me, soldier,” she growls lowly, putting as much “alpha” in her voice as she dares to. She doesn’t know what else to do. It’d helped soothe Gabe when she couldn’t knot him, at least, and it’d helped Daniel when he’d been in too much pain to be touched, and it’d helped when Howard had been wild and foolishly drunk and in no state to partner any of the opportunistic alphas sniffing around his skirts. 

She can only hope it helps Barnes, too. 

He looks at her, at least. His mouth is pulled too tight and his eyes are wide and too bright, but he’s looking. 

“What’s all this fuss?” she demands, pretending this is nothing and keeping the alpha influence in her tone. Barnes’s fingers curl defensively, but don’t quite make it to fists. His breathing steadies, at least a little. “Do you think I’d be done with you that quickly?” 

“I killed people,” Barnes rasps. Peggy is filled with a burning fury the likes of which she had thought she’d outgrown the passion to feel. 

“Tell me something I don’t know,” she says, sharper than she should. 

“I killed Howard Stark,” he says with a dull, empty look. She barks out a laugh, still much too sharp. Steve is pale as death--as ice. 

“I said something I _don’t_ know,” she retorts. “And preferably something true, next time. HYDRA killed Howard Stark. Your body was just the thing they used to do it.” 

“Carter,” Barnes says, his expression turning pained and pleading. Peggy wants to burn the world down for him. It’s a very young emotion, and a hard one to control. 

But she’s been young before. 

“I told you I wasn’t done,” she says. Barnes very obviously isn’t either. He’s sweat-soaked and flushed, and even this conversation wasn’t enough to soften his cock or keep his slick from smearing down his thighs. His pheromones are still muted and unhealthy, but the rest of him is _screaming_ for the closest knot. 

And at this point, it’s not just his slick on his thighs. 

He smells like he belongs to her, now. 

“Am I for you or not?” Peggy asks him. “Didn’t Steve promise?” 

“I--yes,” Barnes says, hesitance flickering across his face. Peggy lets no similar emotion show, and lets no drop of alpha influence leave her voice. 

“Then allow me to do as I’m meant to,” she says, pushing her hand up his thigh. His eyes drop to it so fast they might as well be anchored. 

“Please,” he says in a small, shaken voice. “I don’t--please don’t tease, Carter. _Please_.” 

“Never,” she swears again, then leans in to kiss the corner of his mouth. He whines quietly at the contact and shivers all over, but doesn’t kiss back. Peggy doesn’t push it. She’s not teasing, of course, but she does need to buy her clit some time, even in as close to sympathy rut as Barnes’s pheromones can help her get. She wishes the children had just put the body in rut from the _start_. “Like this again?” she asks him, stroking the underside of his thigh. “On your back?” 

“You could switch. You used to like being on top,” Steve suggests quietly, and Peggy wonders what he’s thinking. She has no objections to being in Steve Rogers’s arms, except for how it’ll break her heart, but breaking is what hearts do. Whatever _Steve_ wants to do, now--who knows? 

That’s not what he means by “switch” anyway, she’s sure; it’s just the young and foolish part of her hearing that in what he said. 

“We could switch, yes,” she agrees, watching Barnes carefully. His eyes skitter sideways, and then he’s pushing himself up and grabbing her shoulders. She lets him roll them over with every intention to let him arrange her how he likes against the mattress, but it’s not the mattress her back hits after all. 

Most definitely not the mattress. 

“Ah,” she says, eyes just barely widening, and Steve wraps his arms around her hesitantly but firmly: a cradle and bed. Barnes straddles their thighs and looks down at her clit with a hungry little noise, and it twitches under the attention. Between the two of them, her erection's recovering faster than it has since she was a teenager. Maybe faster than it _ever_ has, she can’t help but feel. 

But being young again is like that, apparently. 

“Better?” Steve murmurs very quietly against her ear. She doesn’t understand the question. Is there _anything_ that being surrounded by Steve Rogers’s arms could not make--

Oh, she realizes, nostrils just barely flaring as she realizes just what else she’s surrounded by right now, gentled by the lack of heat but not chemical-tinged and sick at all. 

Steve’s pheromones. 

She’s never scented him aroused before. His suppressants always . . . 

“Acceptable,” she manages, swallowing roughly. Steve makes a quiet noise and Barnes watches her uncertainly for a moment, adjusting his hospital gown up higher against his neck. The tie at the back must’ve been tugged loose, with how much he has to move it; Peggy’s not sure why he doesn’t just take it off entirely. There’s nothing either embarrassed or flirtatious about the way he holds the gown up, he’s just keeping his chest covered like he didn’t care to cover his thighs or cock or--

Then she notices that his hand is just a little off-center. Off-center towards the left, to be specific. 

So no, it’s not his chest he’s keeping covered. 

She doesn’t say anything because it’s not her place to say. Daniel could be like that about his injuries too, back in the day, and she’d never pressed the issue with him either. When he’d been fine letting people see, he’d let them; when he hadn’t, he hadn’t. Barnes is fine with her hands on his body and her clit inside it, with her pheromones soothing his heat, and that’s the important part. 

“Come here, why don’t you,” she coaxes, putting a hand on Barnes’s hip. He does. 

He very _much_ does, because while what Peggy means is “come here, settle in, and let me touch you”, what Barnes clearly hears is “come here, grab my clit, and _sit_ on it”, because that is exactly what he does. She bites back the curse of shock that wants to escape as his body swallows her because Barnes might take it wrong, but digs her nails into his hip and hisses hotly all the same. He squeezes tight around her, still wet with her come and his own slick, and she hisses again and lets her head fall back against Steve’s warm, broad shoulder. 

She hadn’t even realized how hard she was. She can’t even _believe_ how hard she is. Maybe such a young omega and null wouldn’t know what to expect an alpha’s stamina to be like. 

“You’re right,” Barnes says breathlessly, his voice a little shaky as he squirms in place. Peggy can’t quite catch up for a moment, too dizzy with the feeling, but then realizes he’s not talking to her anyway. Which--which she is quite all right with, just now. “I like it.” 

“I know,” Steve murmurs back quietly, and Barnes just gives a helpless laugh and shakes his head. 

And then he _moves_. 

“Oh,” Peggy gasps. Barnes rocks his hips down and swallows her up, and she groans in the back of her throat and drags heavy hands down his thighs. Everything is so goddamn _much_ like this, she thinks inanely, struggling desperately to keep her body under control. Surely she wasn’t ever this sensitive, this easy, this _young_. Surely Barnes’s body and Steve’s pheromones wouldn’t ever have overwhelmed her this completely. 

_Surely_. 

“Peggy,” Steve mumbles against her hair, his arms so strong and steady and his scent making her dizzy, and, _“Ma’am,”_ Barnes moans on top of her, his free hand spreading flat against her stomach, his thighs squeezing against her hips. He’s still holding the gown up over his shoulder where the scar tissue and metal meet. 

“Good, yes. My good boys,” Peggy murmurs hoarsely before she can straighten out her head enough to stop herself. Steve makes a hurt noise and Barnes makes a thrilled one, that wildness in his eyes again. And realization, too. 

“You’re for _us_ ,” he pants, rolling his hips down into hers. Peggy bites back another heated curse and just nods, quick and harsh, because this is not the place she wants to lie about that in. No matter what else, just--not the place at all. 

“Yes, of course I am,” she rasps, pushing her hands up over his hips and around to grip his arse and pull him down tighter on the next rock of his hips. He whines hotly and she growls back, nails digging into soft, thick flesh and urging him into a proper rhythm on top of her. "There you go, aren't you _lovely_. Show me more of that." 

“Please don’t tease, please don’t,” Barnes begs, shaking his head, and Peggy rumbles up at him. 

“Aren’t you just _perfect_ ,” she rumbles quietly, rocking up to meet him just that much harder. Barnes moans breathily, head falling back, and Peggy turns her own head just enough to put her nose against Steve’s jaw and prays her damn knot won’t know the difference between their pheromones. If it holds off again--

But it’s not, she realizes in relief as Barnes’s moaning takes on a new ragged quality in response to the swell of her clit inside him. He works himself over her length a few more times as her knot fattens, letting out a little gasp every time it pops back out of him, and instinct has her growling and grabbing his hips to keep him down and let it fill him up. She can’t hold him, of course, so he does it again anyway. 

Who’s the damn tease _now_? 

She tightens her grip on him with another growl, just to make the point. Barnes shudders hotly but doesn’t stop, and her growl deepens. 

“Feels _good_ ,” Barnes pants, working his way up off her knot again. Peggy hears Steve make a weak little noise, but nearly knocks the back of her skull into his face in frustration herself. He steadies her, but doesn’t otherwise interfere. Not exactly the behavior pattern she’d normally expect from him. 

“Very good,” she agrees roughly anyway, reaching up to grab the back of Barnes’s neck and flattening her other hand on the small of his back to drag him down tight into her lap, “but now _stay_.” 

Barnes pulls back again immediately and Peggy’s about to groan in frustration when she catches the intent look in his eye and realizes he’s just testing her grip--testing how tight she _can_ hold him. Howard had been like that, and Angie too, the time or two their ruts had coincided and they’d just cut out the middlemen. 

_This_ she can do. 

Barnes whines, and Peggy snarls back and digs her nails into his neck like teeth. He whimpers, and she snaps her hips up and _buries_ her clit in him. 

This time he _yells_. 

“ _Good_ boy,” Peggy rumbles up at him, tightening her grip on his sweat-soaked skin. His eyes go wide and his hands scrabble against her stomach for a moment, looking for purchase. She squeezes his neck, and he shudders. 

“Carter, Carter, _Carter_ ,” he chokes out, clutching up around her knot even as he tests her grip again. Peggy doubts he _could_ get off it now, tight as he feels, but she holds onto him as hard as she can anyway. He likes it, judging by the noises it makes him make. 

“Stay,” she growls again. She’s so close to orgasm that it just might kill her, Steve’s pheromones filling in the gaps Barnes’s own couldn’t, but her knot’s still swelling and Barnes is still testing her grip. He hasn’t come again yet, she remembers. “Stay,” she says sharply, baring her teeth at him. “Let me do as I’m _meant_ to.” 

“It feels so _good_ ,” Barnes sobs, covering his face with his hands. Peggy rumbles as soothingly as she can under the circumstances, which isn’t very, and Steve--

Steve purrs, very quietly. 

Peggy comes so fast and hard that she blacks out. Or she must black out--the next thing she knows Barnes is hunched over her gasping and whimpering, his come splattered over her stomach and sweat soaked down both their thighs, and her knot is fully blown and they’re locked so tight that it _aches_. The rest of her feels like either she’ll never move again or she could go ten more rounds right now. 

Her hands are back on Barnes’s arse. She doesn’t remember putting them there, but it was a good choice, definitely. 

“Good,” she murmurs raspily, giving a little squeeze. Barnes jolts, accidentally pulling at their tie, and they both moan. Barnes is panting, the hospital gown slipped down low over his shoulders. Peggy doesn’t feel quite right, even having managed to knot--like she’s missing something, again. She tries to resettle, and Barnes pants louder, his breath huffing hot and ragged against her shoulder from--

Barnes isn’t the one panting against her shoulder. And that’s certainly not _his_ cup pressed a little too tight into her back, either. 

“Steve?” Peggy says, turning just enough to look at him again. She’s not sure what he wants, but he just winces and looks away, hips shifting back as much as they can. 

“Sorry,” he manages hoarsely. His face is flushed and he smells needy and greedy and so implausibly _sad_. Peggy isn’t even sure what to think, much less say. What is he apologizing for? What _would_ he apologize for right now? 

Barnes makes a confused little noise, looking past her to Steve, and Peggy breathes out and rolls her hips up gently into him to make sure the heat symptoms stay at bay a little longer. His breath hitches, and she rumbles approvingly. 

“Good boy,” she says on another careful roll. “So sweet and wet for me, too. How’s your friend?” 

“He’s my friend,” Barnes murmurs, still looking at Steve. He’s not making eye contact, but he’s most definitely looking at him. 

“Yes, he is,” Peggy agrees, looking at Steve too. He’s been aroused for much longer than she noticed him being aroused, she can’t help but suspect. The two of them do make eye contact this time, but he breaks it almost immediately, and the expression on his face makes her ache. _Darling,_ she wants to call him, but he’s not the one in heat and he didn’t ask her here for himself. 

Didn’t technically _ask_ her here at all, but all the same. 

“He got me for you,” she says, smoothing her hands up Barnes’s thighs and putting a little more into the next rock of her hips. He breathes out, head dropping forward again, but is still looking at Steve. 

“Us,” he says. Peggy’d forgotten, but he’d said that before, hadn’t he. “He got you for us. It was--there was a paper. I signed it. Because it was only if I signed it.” 

“. . . yes,” she agrees carefully, unsure exactly what he’s remembering. The heat partner paperwork from the war? Something Steve had done before bringing her here? But it sounds true, at least. “That’s correct.” 

“You wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t signed it,” Barnes says, biting his lip with an uncertain expression. Peggy’s not sure what he means by that either, but when she glances at Steve again, the other looks wrecked. 

“Peggy’d never touch you if you didn’t want touched, Buck,” he says softly. 

. . . oh. 

“You signed it too,” Barnes says, and Peggy _feels_ Steve tense against her back. Barnes’s expression doesn’t change at all. 

“I--” Steve swallows, shaking his head. “Peggy’s here for you, Buck. I wouldn’t--I wouldn’t take a knot from you when you need it.” 

“Mm.” Barnes shifts in place testingly and shrugs the gown off the rest of the way to bare his body, clenching around her clit again in the process, and Peggy hisses through her teeth. “Her mouth felt good,” he says after a moment, tone just as testing as the movement was. In another situation, Peggy would be offended to be left out of the conversation, considering the topic. In this one, she’s more absorbed with the sight of Barnes’s naked chest and Steve’s flushed face and the scent of his unquelled pheromones heavy in the air around them. 

"That's not--" Steve breaks off; swallows hard. Peggy imagines what that armored uniform might be hiding again--a wet and needy hole, sweat-slick thighs, a swollen cock--

“S’a big knot,” Barnes breathes, shifting on top of her again. “We could share.” 

_Jesus_. 

“Bucky,” Steve says helplessly, then just shakes his head. Peggy’s not sure how to take that. 

“How ‘bout it, Carter?” Barnes murmurs, looking down at her with the same lazy, war-torn smirk he wore the first time she ever saw him. “Can Steve have a ride?” 

“Not if you keep talking like _that_ ,” Peggy grunts, digging her nails into his thigh. Her knot is _never_ going to go down at this rate. It’s the most “Barnes” that Barnes has seemed to her since she walked in the door, though, and maybe there’s a reason for that. 

The things they must’ve done to him for _wanting_ , before . . . 

Maybe he can remember himself better when he’s wanting things for someone else. It was Steve surrendering that made Barnes spare him, or so the lines she’s had to read between would imply. 

Or maybe it’s just easier, wanting things for other people. 

It’s not as if Peggy is unfamiliar with that concept. 

“She’s here for you,” Steve says, jaw tight. Peggy just looks at him. He smells so sweet, his pheromones riled up enough that she can hardly tell the difference between his arousal and another omega’s true heat. 

She wonders what his heat _would_ smell like, if this is just arousal. 

“Barnes doesn’t mind,” she says, watching his face carefully. “And your pheromones are responding.” 

“I--” Steve’s face twists, and he hides whatever expression he makes next against her hair, his body restless underneath hers and his arms stiff around her. Barnes shifts on top of her again and a twinge of pleasure goes through her, but her knot’s a little softer. He’s testing it. She puts a hand on his thigh to keep him from pulling off too soon, mostly because she’s not sure he wouldn’t consider hurting himself to be an acceptable consequence. 

“Steve?” she asks as gently as she can, other hand coming up to touch his hair. He makes a miserable noise. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t . . . I just . . . Peggy, God, I--I _missed_ you.” 

“. . . yes. Yes, I missed you too,” Peggy murmurs in response, and then allows herself: “Darling.” 

Steve doesn’t make a sound at all, but his shoulders tremble. 

She _has_ missed him, for a long, long time now. Like she misses Gabe. And Jarvis, and Angie, and Howard and Daniel and every man who ever called himself a Howling Commando, every person she ever failed or fought for, and everyone else she can remember so sharply and so _immediately_ again, the balm of time and distance and long life torn away, all of it as bad as any of her flashbacks or episodes, maybe even _worse_ than-- 

Even when they’ve spoken face to face, she’s missed Steve. 

She breathes out. Barnes moves again and this time her clit slips out of him easily, slick and sticky and soft. Barnes licks his lips at the sight of it, and Peggy has to repress a groan. He moves off her, mercifully, and she grabs his flesh and bone arm to tug his wrist in close to her nose and get a clear impression of his pheromones straight from his pulse point, weak and overwhelmed that they are. The chemical scent is as bad as ever, but she can still smell satiation. 

Temporary satiation, for certain, but satiation all the same. 

So yes--Steve can be the priority for a little while, now. 

“Steve,” she says as she lets go of Barnes’s wrist and turns over carefully and then, of course, she’s between Steve’s legs. She was already, of course, but it feels more intimate and urgent this way, with her laying on top of him and keeping her hips up so she won’t get her come and Barnes’s slick all over the uniform. From how dark Steve flushes, she suspects it’s the same for him. 

“C’mon, when’s the last time you had a nice fat clit in you?” Barnes asks, stretching out beside him and giving him another one of those ghost-smirks: a dead expression he seems to be trying very hard to bring back to life. “Gotta be _months_ , knowing you, pal.” 

“I haven’t,” Steve replies tightly, eyes casting down just enough not to look at either of their faces. Barnes looks startled. “I--haven’t.” 

“. . . still?” Barnes asks after a moment, tone uncertain. Peggy lays a hand on his hip because he’s close enough to let her do it, and he leans into the contact. She can’t think of a way to tell him that the uncertainty sounds less disingenuous than the smirking teasing did, but she couldn’t think of a way to tell him that during the war, either, so it’s not unexpected. 

“I’m on suppressants,” Steve says, still not looking at them. 

“Don’t mean you can’t _touch_ people,” Barnes says, shifting restlessly, and Steve just barely frowns. Peggy wonders if this is how they’d always argued. It seems unfamiliar to her, but then, she’s not sure she’d ever seen them argue before. Not sincerely, at least. 

“I didn’t say I don’t touch people,” Steve says, shaking his head. 

“Yeah. Sure.” Barnes’s eyes are tracking his face. “So who you touched lately?” 

_“Bucky--”_

“Perhaps now is not the time,” Peggy finally suggests, laying her other hand over the star on Steve’s chest. He inhales sharply at the contact, even with the body armor in the way, and Barnes’s expression softens a little. 

“Somebody needs to take care of him,” he tells her, still obviously frustrated. “He never lets anybody do it.” 

“Then we’ll do it, if he doesn’t mind,” she replies, and then cranes her neck to finally meet Steve’s eyes again. He looks hungry. And hurt. “ _Do_ you mind, Steve?” 

She’s not sure she can go again this soon, even only having knotted properly the once, but she’s damn well willing to try. Her body still feels hotter and stronger and rut-ready, and if anyone could tip it over, well--of course it would be Steve, if it was anyone. 

It can’t be Gabe anymore, after all. 

“It’s not about what I mind,” Steve says, looking away again. Barnes makes a dissatisfied noise and pushes in against his side, a long and lovely line of uninterrupted flesh pressed up tight against the latest version of the costume that Steve made into a uniform. 

Peggy wants to take it off him with her _teeth_. 

“Wanna give you nice things, Stevie,” Barnes says wheedlingly, pushing a hand up the stripes covering Steve’s stomach. “And Carter’s knot is _real_ nice.” 

“You’re the one who should have nice things,” Steve replies quietly, and Barnes makes a face for a moment, then shakes his head. 

“You give me nice things,” he says, tucking his face into Steve’s shoulder as his fingers curl against his striped stomach. Somehow, Peggy just _knows_ the “nice things” on Barnes’s mental list include food and water and this high-security hospital bed. “Nobody’s ever treated me as nice as you.” 

“That ain’t true,” Steve says, looking pained enough to be thinking the same kind of thing Peggy is and sounding more Brooklyn than he ever has in front of her. 

How much does he love them, that he can look like that and still want them close? 

“As far as I remember it is,” Barnes says. Steve’s jaw tightens, but . . . well. That _is_ all that matters, isn’t it. It’s all Barnes knows. 

“Darling,” Peggy says, and Steve turns his face towards her and she kisses him. 

Seventy years since the one and only time they did this, and she feels both none and every one of them. Steve makes a hurt sound into her mouth and Barnes makes an encouraging one, petting across Steve’s stomach. 

Steve kisses back, which is the only part that matters. 

“Darling, darling, darling,” Peggy keeps murmuring between kisses, cupping his jaw in her hand and settling her full weight down onto his body. She doesn’t care about ruining his uniform. She wants them to ruin it _together_. 

Steve doesn’t whine, but Barnes does. He bites down on Steve’s collar and then up behind his ear, and Peggy ducks her head to mimic the treatment on the other side of his neck. Steve’s pheromones flare in response, bright and lustful but somehow _lonely_ , and Barnes whines again and kisses him. Steve still doesn’t make a sound, but still kisses back. It is messy and awkward and beautiful, and Peggy could kill someone over it. 

“What do you want?” she asks him when the other two break apart, both panting for breath. They weren’t kissing long enough to justify it, but she understands why they would be. 

“Let me--” Steve hesitates, turning his head away for a moment, and Barnes takes the opportunity to lean in and mouth at the back of his neck. An omega putting their mouth on the back of another omega’s neck like they might actually _bite_ them is possibly the most distracting thing that’s ever happened to Peggy in her life, even with body armor in the way. Steve goes heavy under the contact, clearly just as affected himself, and Barnes purrs triumphantly. 

“Let you what?” she manages hoarsely, barely remembering that he’d been speaking. Steve flushes, then casts his eyes down between them. For a moment she assumes he’s going to ask her to finish undressing or for the room to undress himself. 

That is most definitely not what he asks, though. 

“You both--you smell good,” he says, and then just . . . licks his lips. Barnes makes a curious little noise and Peggy takes a moment to properly process the not-quite-request, then feels very faint. 

“You want--” she attempts, but can’t quite finish the sentence. Steve nods roughly, still not looking at her. 

“I missed you,” he says tightly, sounding ashamed to say it. Which makes no sense for the half-second before she is so viscerally reminded just how _young_ he still is. Steve’s never missed anything for as long as she and Barnes missed _him_ , and he knows that. 

And she’s so glad for that, herself. 

“Darling,” she says helplessly, and then pushes herself up onto her knees and shrugs off her unbuttoned shirt as she moves up Steve’s body. Barnes catches up about then, and his eyes light up. Steve’s already pushing himself up enough to meet her with his mouth already half open. 

He’s so _lovely_. 

Her clit’s still soft, although her knot’s more swollen than she’d have expected it to be, even taking into account the blur of years and the emotional charge of this particular situation. Or maybe especially taking those things into account. It’s still sticky with her come and Barnes’s slick, too, and Steve goes right for it, wrapping an arm around the small of her back to pull her in closer. He cleans her clit up with wet little kitten-licks and Peggy grips his shoulder with a low, dirty growl she can’t keep behind her teeth. Barnes makes some incoherently pleased sounds and leans up just enough to mouth at Steve’s jaw, which puts two omegas on eye-level with Peggy’s clit and most _definitely_ gives it Ideas. It twitches urgently against Steve’s tongue and his pheromones flare up again, and Peggy _knows_ hers flare just as sharply in response. Steve’s eyes are a little hazy, and Barnes is breathing faster. 

She puts a hand on both their heads without really thinking it through; Barnes shoves into the contact like a greedy cat, and Steve lets his head loll for a moment before redoubling his efforts to lick her knot clean. There’s more come and slick on his mouth than on her clit, now, which is a sight that any alpha would goddamn kill for, Peggy is certain. 

“Oh, darling, that feels so good,” she murmurs lowly, stroking their hair and not even trying to repress the rasp in her tone. Steve looks up at her from underneath his lashes without taking his tongue off her, and Peggy rumbles low and deep in her chest at the sight. His fingers dig in tight against her back and he opens his mouth and just lets her slide right in without even thinking about it. She doesn’t even remember when she got hard. She can’t believe she _is_ hard--she’s come _twice_ , for God’s sake, and still isn’t even in rut. 

She’d really thought she would be by now. Her clit certainly seems to _think_ they are. 

“May I?” Peggy asks carefully as she touches the stretched corner of Steve’s mouth, trying to keep her breathing steady and struggling with keeping her hips still. Neither’s working particularly well. 

“Let her,” Barnes says, eyes bright. “Feels good when somebody does it nice.” 

Peggy spares a moment to _despise_ HYDRA with every atom she can bring to bear, and Steve digs his nails into her arse and pulls her in. She snarls, low and furious, and then rumbles thick and heady as Steve’s tongue rolls up tight against the bottom of her clit. She rocks her hips into his mouth in slow, steady thrusts and Barnes watches with those wild, bright eyes and puts his hands all over every part of Steve that he can reach and on a few parts of her, as well. She tugs his hair and he moans, pushing in tight against Steve’s side again. She doesn’t look, but she wonders if he might be hard. It’s not easy to tell with Steve’s pheromones overwhelming the room, but he’s looking flushed again. 

She wouldn’t be surprised if his heat was rising again, all things considered. 

Steve pulls back and pulls off to catch his breath, just for a moment, and Barnes shoves in greedily and grabs his face as he kisses the remaining come and slick off his mouth. Peggy could probably knot _air_ , watching that. 

“Stevie, Stevie, fuck, you smell so _good_ , Stevie,” Barnes groans, fingers splaying across Steve’s jaw and throat and mouth peppering little kisses all over his mouth. He hooks a thigh over Steve’s legs behind her, and Peggy drops the hand in his hair to his flank. His temperature’s up again--his heat is definitely cresting again soon, if it’s not already on its way. 

Super-soldiers, she thinks, shaking her head. 

“You too,” Steve murmurs back, brushing Barnes’s hair back off his face and waiting out the breathless rush, still hazy-eyed himself. “You both smell better than anything to me.” 

“You smell like _us_ ,” Bucky pants, pushing his nose into Steve’s jaw. Steve exhales slowly, then glances at Peggy’s clit, and then up to her face. He licks his lips again, which she is too damn old to be so damn _affected_ by, and yet . . . 

“What do you want?” she asks breathlessly, certain she’ll give him any damn thing he asks for. 

“I want you to knot Bucky again,” Steve says, and Bucky immediately makes an offended sound and jerks back. 

“It’s _your_ turn, dammit!” he protests in frustration. 

“Don’t care. I want it for _you_ , Buck,” Steve replies quietly as he looks back to him. He puts a hand on the back of Barnes’s neck, intimate and adoring, and Peggy’s gut heats up at just the sight. “When you feel good like that--there’s _nothing_ I want like I want to see you feel good.” 

“How many times you gonna let a fucking _nightmare_ like me slut it up all over your alpha? She gotta knock me up before you’ll take something you want?!” Barnes demands angrily, hands fisting in the blankets as Steve’s eyes flash. Peggy grimaces. 

“Your heat is going to need quelled again soon, Barnes,” she reminds him shortly, fairly certain that they’re in no condition to be unpacking that sentence at the moment and that the argument will become moot if it drags on much longer anyway. Barnes bares his teeth. 

“Don’t _care_ ,” he snaps. “Dammit, Steve! Let me _do_ something for you!” 

“Then let Peggy knot you,” Steve says, smoothing his hand down over Barnes’s back and looking at him intently. “That’s what I want for me. I want to know you’re safe and you feel good and nobody’s touching you without getting through me first.” 

“Nobody else cares about that!” Barnes hisses, visibly bristling. 

“ _I_ do,” Steve insists, and Barnes bares his teeth again. 

“I _don’t_!” he snarls. “I ain’t never had that, you’re the _only_ one who thinks I oughta have that, I just--” 

“You _have_ ,” Steve says sharply, grabbing Barnes’s face. Barnes cuts himself off at the harshness of Steve’s voice, and Peggy moves to Steve’s unoccupied side and watches them silently. It’s not a conversation she belongs in. Or not one she feels she _should_ belong in, perhaps. “You have. And you deserved it. And I want to see you have it again.” 

“I don’t,” Barnes chokes, face twisting into misery for one brief flash. “I don’t--not _nothing_ , Rogers, I don’t deserve a fucking thing except a bullet in the fucking _head_.” 

Steve goes white-faced and fury _pours_ off him, and Barnes recoils violently. Peggy stiffens, and can’t imagine how much worse it is facing that expression head-on. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, sir, please sir,” Barnes blurts, his shoulders locked up tight. “I’ll be good, I won’t malfunction, I--” 

“Barnes,” Peggy says, very quietly. Barnes stays stiff and frozen, all his attention on Steve--on the perceived danger. Which, well . . . 

No matter how well one seems to be, that doesn’t take away how unwell they really are. 

At least for Barnes the situation can improve, Peggy tells herself, knowing she’ll have to tell Steve the same thing later. _Barnes_ has improved. This borrowed body--well. Never mind that now. 

“You’re all right, soldier,” she says. “All’s well.” Barnes makes a genuinely undefinable noise and does the absolute last thing she would’ve expected, which is dart away from Steve to hide behind her. 

Hide _from Steve_. 

The hiding itself she can more or less make sense of--even an omega like Barnes is still an omega, and he is an omega who is in heat, traumatized, slathered in her pheromones, _and_ twice full of her come. Some reactions are just natural. But hiding from _Steve_ . . . 

That is the least natural reaction she could imagine, for Barnes. 

“You’re all right,” she says anyway as she reaches back to lay a hand on his shoulder, because it’s the reaction she needs to react to all the same: Barnes on the bed behind her, shaken and shaking and trying to make himself small. She can’t let herself think about what they must’ve done to him. 

Not if she doesn’t want to make the same mistake Steve just did, anyway. 

“Good man,” she murmurs, moving her hand up to the back of Barnes’s neck, and he goes limp under the pressure and leans heavily into her. Natural reactions. 

Like Steve’s face, right now, and the agonized look on it. 

“Carter,” Barnes whimpers so quietly she barely hears him, and she digs her nails in just enough to stop the tremble in his shoulders. He goes even heavier against her; part of her’s amazed she can take his weight. “I didn’t--I don’t--” 

“I am the last person you need to explain to,” Peggy tells him, drawing her nails gently down his neck. She imagines he doesn’t know, but . . . well. 

Of course she knows. 

Barnes just makes a pained noise, shaking his head against her shoulder, and she digs her nails in a little harder for him. He very, very obviously needs it, to the point she might honestly put her _teeth_ in him if she thought it would help. 

“You don’t need to explain to anyone. It was my fault,” Steve says quietly. The next noise Barnes makes is even _more_ pained, but he pulls back just enough to look at Steve. 

And so then he sees Steve’s face, and the awful look on it. 

Peggy wishes, irrationally, that Steve had just thrown the bed back at the start. And Barnes--Barnes looks at her instead, but doesn’t say anything. 

“What do you need?” Peggy asks, having nothing better to offer. Barnes is an omega--an omega in heat and traumatized and covered with pheromones and full of come--and she is the alpha whose pheromones and come it is. He’s not the only one to have natural reactions. 

“I need you to knot me,” he says, not quite looking her in the eye. Peggy pauses with her fingers still against his neck, and Steve goes still. “Knot me and--and show Steve how good it makes me feel.” 

“You’re sure?” Peggy asks carefully. 

“Please,” Barnes says, his voice a little too tight, and Peggy--

Well. She’s an alpha, after all. 

“Of course I will,” she murmurs, pressing a kiss to his temple as she gives his neck a gentle squeeze. Barnes makes a low noise and squeezes his eyes shut, shifting into the contact. “How do you want me?” 

“So Sir can--” Barnes grimaces, shakes his head--“so Steve can see.” 

“Of course,” Peggy says, and gets up onto her knees to guide Steve back against the wall at the head of the bed, positioning him carefully. Barnes stays behind her, and Steve gives her a helpless look. “It’s alright, darling,” she promises him, squeezing his shoulders reassuringly, although she’s not sure how well he feels it through the body armor. Perhaps this isn’t a perfect coping mechanism, but Barnes wants it and she wants it too--she wants Barnes to feel as good as he _can_. 

And Steve. Steve wanted it first. 

So yes. Of course she and Barnes want it too. 

Peggy shifts back to take off the last of the unfortunate ensemble the children put this borrowed body in and lets Barnes press in against her back, his fingers fumbling awkwardly with the clasp of her bra. She supposes he’s never taken one this style off before, although she doubts the metal hand is helping. His cock presses into her hip and she glances back to admire the look of it, a pretty little curve laid against her body. It deserves attention, certainly. 

She imagines his hole needs more, though, if his cock is already so hard. 

“Come here,” she coaxes patiently, reaching back to tug him forward. Barnes goes like a lamb on a leash, docile and doubtless, and lets her push him forward onto his hands and knees between Steve’s spread legs. It seems the most efficient way to achieve their goal. “Like this?” she asks anyway, because assuming is the last thing she wants to do right now. 

“Like this," Barnes agrees, pushing his hips back towards her pointedly. Peggy leans over him and presses a kiss to the back of his sweat-slicked shoulder, and is mildly surprised to find out she’s still wearing enough lipstick to leave a mark. The sight makes something burn in her gut in a very _alpha_ way--because of course it does, proof of her mouth on an omega who wants her touch. 

She could’ve kissed his neck, she thinks. 

So she does. Her mouth leaves another lipstick mark on overheated skin and Barnes--he can’t see it, obviously, doesn’t know she did it for that purpose, but Barnes purrs anyway. It’s a stuttering, cracked sound like he might not remember quite how it goes, but it’s still unmistakably a purr. 

Peggy wants to ruin everyone who ever did anything to him. She wants to set off _bombs_. 

“You’re so lovely,” she says instead, nuzzling the back of his head. Barnes whines very quietly and starts to duck his head, but then--doesn’t. Peggy wonders why for a moment, but then remembers. 

They’re showing Steve, aren’t they. 

“ _So_ lovely,” she repeats, kissing Barnes’s neck again and running a hand up the inside of his thigh. There’s sweat and slick smeared against it, proof of his need, and when her fingers trail all the way up she’s rewarded with Barnes’s breathless little cry and a fresh rush of warm wetness that drips down over her palm. His heat is definitely cresting again. She slips a finger into him almost automatically and he makes a pleading, protesting noise. 

“Not that,” he says. “That’s not _enough_. You said you wouldn’t tease, Carter, _c’mon_.” 

“And I assure you, I will not,” Peggy promises, sliding in another finger to curl inside him. Barnes whines and his body reflexively tries to lock her fingers; she makes a sympathetic noise and strokes the tensed muscles soothingly. He just whines even louder, thighs trembling. 

“Carter, you _said_!” he protests. 

“She’s just being careful with you, Buck,” Steve murmurs, running his hands up Barnes’s shoulders. “Let her be? Please?” 

“I don’t want _teased_ ,” Barnes says pleadingly, shaking his head like he didn’t even hear him. Peggy can’t deny him, under the circumstances--not that she ever _would_. She’d just wanted to be sure he was still wet and receptive, without healthy pheromones to judge by. 

“I did say,” she assures him as she takes her hand back. Barnes tries to lock again, that same reflexive clutching around her fingers, and chokes on a whimper when it--obviously--doesn’t work; she noises back soothingly. Her fingers are wet with the two of them, slick and come mixed together, and she resists the urge to delay so she can lick them clean and instead uses that hand to guide her clit to his hole. 

And _then_ she licks them clean. 

Barnes whimpers again, and Steve strokes a hand back through his hair. Peggy pushes in and Barnes moans, immediately rocking back onto her. He locks his elbows and keeps his head up, so obviously _showing Steve_ , and Peggy rumbles approvingly and kisses the back of his neck again as she rolls her hips into his. 

His main focus is very obviously not on that, though. 

“You like it?” Barnes asks hoarsely, tilting his head for Steve’s hand as the other strokes his hair again. 

“Do you?” Steve asks quietly, cupping his jaw. Peggy can’t see Barnes’s expression, but the shiver in his spine provides enough of his reaction. 

“I--yeah, _yeah_ , Stevie, I like it, Carter feels so _good_ in me,” he manages, shuddering harder as Peggy makes a point to run her hands up his thighs. 

“Then I love it,” Steve says, and kisses him. Barnes moans into it and kisses back, and Peggy concentrates on keeping a steady rhythm as she rocks her hips into his. He moans again, and Steve purrs quietly. “I love it more than anything, Buck.” 

Peggy really can’t help feeling that “it” wasn’t the word Steve wanted to use, but doesn’t blame him from holding back. 

She doesn’t hold back herself, though, because that’s not what Barnes asked for. 

“Stevie, Steve, she fits me just right, Stevie, feel so hot, I _love_ it,” Barnes pants between messy kisses, shivering and shaking and rocking back to meet Peggy’s every thrust. Steve kisses the corner of his mouth as he gasps for breath, sneaking his hands underneath to stroke his chest, and Barnes moans again, arching his back to push into them. Steve tweaks his nipples sharply and Barnes curses behind his teeth and tightens _deliciously_ around Peggy’s clit. _“Steve!”_

“Show me,” Steve says quietly, and Barnes starts whimpering and rocks back even harder; it takes all Peggy’s strength to control his hips enough to keep him from bucking her off altogether; she’s frankly amazed she _can_. Steve strokes Barnes’s throat and neck and chest and just watches. 

“I want it, I want it, I _want_ it,” Barnes chants breathlessly between them--not a request, but a confirmation. Steve tugs at his nipples again and he starts keening. 

“You have it,” Peggy promises him, digging her nails into his hips as she watches them together. Their technique hasn’t much improved, but it’s still more than worth watching. “You’re doing so well.” 

“Please,” Barnes pleads, and Peggy thrusts harder. He keens again and she glances up to Steve’s face, gratified to see that the look he’s giving Barnes is more adoring than pained. 

He’s still buttoned up to the neck, though. He smells so good, so urgent and desperate and gorgeous, and they’ve barely touched him at all. Barnes keeps kissing him the best he can, at least, but Peggy can’t reach him properly herself, can’t put her hands on him the right way. 

She wants to. 

But Steve wants to see Barnes feel good, and Barnes wants to give him that. And so does she, really--and then, maybe, maybe then he’ll let them get their hands under his suit and on his skin, let them kiss his neck and throat and bite down his chest and touch him where he needs them. She’s so _sure_ he needs them. 

But that’s not what he’s asking for. 

_“Carter!”_ Barnes wails, and Peggy drags her mouth down his shoulder with a red smear and digs her nails into his hips as she _snaps_ her own into him. She thinks she could knot just watching Steve put his hands all over Barnes’s face and neck, but really, she could do it on even less. Just the fact the two of them are touching at all--that could be enough, she thinks. 

It’s not even all she’s getting, with the way Barnes is moving under her. He feels so good, feels strong and greedy and _wild_ under her hands. She can understand why Steve wanted to see it. She wants to see it too. 

She just also wants to see it for _Steve_. 

“There you are, you’re doing so well,” she murmurs to Barnes, stroking his thighs again and tugging at his hips to pull him in tighter. He goes with her immediately, moaning louder when her clit rubs him at a different angle and visibly struggling to keep himself upright. “Good soldier. You’re all right, you can put yourself where you need to.” 

“Supposed to show him, he’s gotta _see_ ,” Barnes chokes out in breathless protest, shaking his head desperately. Peggy’s certain he’d have already come all over both her knot and that star-spangled body armor if he weren’t so busy worrying about what Steve’s seeing. “Please, I just--wanna _show_ him.” 

“Buck, I’ll see you _wherever_ you are,” Steve swears lowly, wrapping his arms around his neck and tugging him closer. Barnes just makes a wet, heartbroken sound and shakes his head again. He’s so slick and hot around her clit that Peggy can barely concentrate enough to keep fucking him, but since her knot’s half-blown already that’s very close to not being a concern any longer. They’ll be locked inside the minute, if not sooner. 

“You’re already showing him,” Peggy rumbles soothingly, suspecting that’s the better approach to take. “You’ve done so well, Barnes. Just a little more, now. Let’s let Steve see what you deserve to have.” 

_“Please!”_ Barnes sobs. Peggy wraps an arm underneath him to rub his pretty little cock and Steve grips his face in his hands and kisses him messy and awkward and loving. She could not for the life of her say which of those things makes Barnes come, but he most definitely does: all over her clit and all over Steve’s uniform, just like she’d expected. He collapses between them with a sharp, reedy cry and they catch him between them too, Steve’s strong arms around his shoulders and Peggy’s slick-sticky hands under his hips as she shudders through the long, slow orgasm that his lock is already wringing out of her. 

“Oh, _Barnes_ ,” she groans roughly, pressing her forehead into the back of his shoulder. He lets out another little cry, body shaking with aftershocks, and she struggles to keep herself from collapsing outright. 

Then Barnes rolls his hips back to rub her knot just where he wants it, and yes, well. So much for staying upright. 

Fucking _heat_ , she swears to herself, barely catching herself against the mattress. Barnes pants hotly as her weight hits his back and rubs back against her again, and Peggy bares her teeth instinctively. If it were Gabe--if it were Gabe acting like this, she’d put her teeth in his neck to settle him, remind him that she was with him and _had_ him. But it’s not Gabe, hasn’t been Gabe for a long time now, and Barnes is in no state of mind to ask for _anyone’s_ teeth, much less those of an alpha three times his biological age who’s been shoved into a borrowed body. 

Steve’s, maybe. But Steve doesn’t seem to be of the mind to do that just now, even as he rearranges himself underneath them to let Barnes weigh down heavily atop him. Peggy manages to put her nails against the nape of Barnes’s neck in an attempt to get him to stay still. Barnes, in response, grinds into _both_ of them. 

“Jesus Christ,” Peggy chokes, burying her face against his back. 

“So _fat_ , Carter,” Barnes whines urgently, rolling his hips back again. She thinks he might actually be trying for another orgasm. Which--she’s not complaining, Barnes deserves all of those he can get, but _God_ , he couldn’t even take a minute first? 

“Bucky,” Steve manages, sounding shaken, and Barnes whines again and grinds down harder against him. If they weren’t locked, Peggy’d be encouraging the behavior a lot more, but the idea of Barnes’s come all over that uniform is almost enough to make up for it. Of course, if they weren’t locked it could be his come and his slick and _her_ come all together on that uniform, but that’s a whole different story. 

“Stevie, she’s so _fat_ ,” Barnes keens, still squirming restlessly between them. “Wanna, want another, want _more_.” 

“Super-soldiers,” Peggy mutters incredulously, digging her nails into his neck again. It just makes him moan. Keeping her teeth out of him is only getting harder. “Shhhh, soldier, you’re all right. You can have as many as you want.” 

Just hopefully not _all_ on her knot. She’s already about to start whimpering herself from overstimulation. Barnes is making such greedy, needy noises that she can’t bring herself to stop him, though. 

“Good, I’ll be good, please let me, I’ll be _so_ good,” Barnes babbles hoarsely, and Peggy has to bite back an ugly snarl. The vengeance she would take, with five minutes and a list of names, with five _seconds_ \--

Steve tips Barnes’s head up and kisses his mouth, and Barnes melts like butter. Two more rolls of his hips and he’s coming again, slower and subtler but with no less relief, and Peggy puts her whole body into weighing him down, pinning him between them as best as she can without involving her teeth. 

He goes limp and liquid between their bodies, so she assumes she’s done well enough. 

“Very good,” she murmurs quietly, reaching up to tuck his hair behind his ear. Barnes tilts his head into the contact without opening his eyes and lets out a soft, stuttering little purr that could break any alpha’s heart. She worries they’re crushing Steve, but if they are he’s too busy looking at Barnes’s face to care. 

“Yeah,” he manages. “Yeah, that was--that was really good, Buck.” 

“I’m good,” Barnes says uncertainly, hiding his face against Steve’s chest. 

“You’re the goddamn _best_ ,” Steve replies tightly, wrapping his arms tighter around him. Barnes’s skin doesn’t seem so hot now, and Peggy strokes a hand down his side carefully to make sure. He presses just barely into the contact, but that’s all; she thinks it might be safe to assume this wave of his heat has subsided, although she really doesn’t know how soon to expect the next. The last one came faster than she would’ve thought, and demanded more than she would’ve expected. 

Still. She can only work with what she knows. 

“Well done,” she murmurs, smoothing a hand over his ribs again. Steve still doesn’t seem to notice their weight, but she catches Barnes’s hip and tugs him aside anyway, carefully rolling them off him and to their sides. It seems the wiser decision. 

Steve helps just as carefully, mindful of both their lock and Barnes’s desire to keep his face hidden, but in the last moment Peggy glances at his face and he looks--distressed, actually. 

“Steve?” she asks, even more careful than she’d moved them. He just shakes his head and shifts in closer to let Barnes hide more comfortably against him. Peggy might’ve pressed, in a different situation, but without her having to hold herself up, that puts him in close enough to be touched. 

She lays a hand on Steve’s hip, slow and easy, and his pheromones _flare_. Barnes hisses, tensing between them, but Peggy is too overwhelmed by the rush of Steve’s scent and the sudden clutch of Barnes’s body around her clit to make a sound. 

“Steve, _Steve_ ,” Barnes pants. 

“Oh, darling,” is the best Peggy can manage, voice strangled and cracked. She digs her nails into the body armor. 

“I’m okay. I’m fine,” Steve says. He’s a terrible liar. 

“Yeah, you’re always fine,” Barnes grunts, still panting against the shoulder of the uniform. It must be filthy with his come. It must be filthy with Steve’s _slick_ , inside. “You smell like you’re gonna fucking _lose_ it, Rogers.” 

“I’m fine,” Steve says again. Peggy slides her hand up his side, looking for someplace closer to skin but only finding the armor. Steve shudders anyway. 

“Please take it off,” she murmurs. “Let us touch you.” 

“I--” Steve hesitates, and Barnes bares his teeth, grabs his arse with the metal hand, and _squeezes_. Steve gasps sharply, jerking forward, and Barnes bites roughly at the corner of his jaw and what little of his throat the uniform doesn’t cover. 

“Wanna _touch_ you,” he growls, pressing their bodies together: naked skin against flashy armor, both sticky and stained. The move tugs sharply at the tie, and Peggy growls deeper, covering the back of Barnes’s metal hand with her own. She squeezes too, and he mimics the pressure against the suit instantly. 

“Can this tear Kevlar, do you think?” she asks as mildly as she’s capable of. Steve groans, and Barnes _purrs_. 

“Yeah,” he says, licking his lips. “Yeah, I think so. Bet it can, anyway. You want that, Stevie? It’s okay if we just tear it off you? It’s all wrecked up anyway, right?” 

“You know how hard it is to repair these?” Steve asks with a humorless attempt at a smile, ducking his head. 

“S’okay. I can just rip it right _here_ \--” Barnes squeezes again to make his point, and Steve chokes--“make just enough space for Carter to get inside you. Won’t be much to fix, then.” 

“Bucky--” Steve grits out past a hard shudder, and Peggy nuzzles the back of Barnes’s neck with a low, gentle rumble. 

“Don’t push, soldier,” she cautions. “Let him ask.” 

They’re still tied, anyway. There’s no rush. 

“Okay, okay,” Barnes says, shifting restlessly and tugging at the tie again; Peggy inhales roughly and puts her nails in his neck, which only barely serves to steady him. “Nnnn. Carter, you’re so _thick_. Stevie, you don’t even know, it feels so fucking _good_ when an alpha comes in you, I could get off just for _that_.” 

“She’s not in rut, Buck,” Steve says, sounding a little breathless anyway. And it’s true, to Peggy’s own confusion--she’d felt so _close_ to it when she’d woken up in this body, still feels so close to it even now, but maybe that’s just been the blush and rush of youth distorting her perceptions. And no matter how aroused Steve smells, there still aren’t proper heat pheromones in the air to trigger a sympathy rut. 

The stupid eager nature of youth, though, makes it so she still feels like she could go another round or ten. 

“Don’t care. Doesn’t matter,” Barnes says, squirming in a way that makes Peggy’s clit twitch inside him. He must be so full after all this, come and slick all trapped inside. If she could pull out right now, he’d probably _gush_. “You can bust your knot again, right, Carter? Steve hasn’t had it yet.” 

“Spirit’s willing, at least,” Peggy replies, because at this point she honestly doesn’t know herself. She doesn’t know this body at all anymore. 

“Yeah, you can,” Barnes breathes, squirming around her again; Peggy bites back a groan. “He’s already gotta be wet enough for you, you just gotta treat ‘im right. You saw me take her, right, Stevie? You know what to do? Ain’t hard.” 

“Well-- _ideally_ hard,” Peggy can’t help pointing out dryly. Barnes laughs, then looks startled to have done it; Steve just watches him with a strange combination of resignation and hunger. 

“I’m not worried about taking a knot,” he says. “Can’t be any tighter a fit than your huge mitts used to be.” 

“We did that?” Barnes licks his lips, and Peggy catches a glimpse of the wild-eyed look on his face again. “Yeah. We did that. I wanted you to do it after Azzano, you’d got so _big_. But you wouldn’t.” 

“I should’ve,” Steve says, eyes flicking down again. “I thought--I should’ve.” 

“Yeah, you should’ve,” Barnes agrees with a breathless nod. “And you should do this, too.” 

“I . . .” Steve hesitates, and then sits up and looks down at both of them with an expression that ninety-some years on this earth has not taught Peggy Carter to read. Barnes seems to know it, though, from the way he goes taut and expectant underneath it. 

She wants to lay her hand on Steve’s hip again, but she can’t reach anymore. 

But that’s all right, because Steve is taking off the uniform. 

“Thank _fuck_ ,” Barnes groans, fumbling to help him as best as he can from his position. Peggy is mostly distracted by the sight of the fitted undershirt revealed when Steve peels off the under-armor, which is so tight that she can see the pretty tease of his nipples peaking the fabric. 

Lord forgive her for what that sight does to her, she thinks, pressing her lips tight together to keep her teeth in. 

Steve unfastens his boots and slips off the bed; Barnes makes the exact same sound of distress that Peggy does, and they both half-reach for him. Steve flushes and occupies himself with getting out of his boots. He’s a soldier; Peggy knows he could’ve been undressed in seconds, if he’d wanted. She’s just not sure if he’s shy, uncertain, or maybe giving _them_ the show this time. 

“Give a guy a minute, would you,” Steve mutters, turning away in embarrassment as he pushes down his pants. Peggy nearly bites through her lip. 

Of course, she thinks inanely. Of course _Steve goddamn Rogers_ wears tiny little cotton bikini panties that don’t even cover his ass. Of course. 

And of course they’re white, and he’s so wet that they’re practically _see-through_. 

“Good lord,” she says faintly. 

_“Stevie,”_ Barnes purrs. Steve turns absolutely crimson and jerks back upright, then shoots Barnes a dirty look over his shoulder. 

“Oh, you think you’re funny,” he grumbles. Peggy would say something, but the combination of the little white T-shirt and little white panties and all that gorgeous, golden skin and sweetly-scented pheromones is sucking every drop of higher thought she has out of her head. 

“Please get over here, Steve,” is about the best she can manage, reaching towards him again. Barnes wriggles meaningfully, testing the tie, and she has to bury a growl against his shoulder but can’t take her eyes off Steve even as she does. 

He manages to turn even redder, which is . . . very pleasant to look at, really. If one were willing to make such a massive understatement about such a masterpiece of an omega, anyway. 

“Please,” she says again, holding out a hand meaningfully. Steve sits down gingerly on the edge of the bed, almost close enough to take it but not quite. 

“I’m fine,” he says again, in blatant defiance of his flushed skin and soaked panties. He may not be in heat, but he is most certainly not _fine_. “I can wait for you two to recover.” 

“ _We_ don’t want to wait,” Peggy says firmly, knowing he won’t hear anything else. She catches his closest hand and squeezes it tight, then reels him in by it. Steve goes with it, gratifyingly, and Barnes gives a happy purr and pushes his hands up his thighs. 

“Bucky,” Steve says, squirming at the touch, and Barnes cranes up to bite at his chest through the shirt. _“Bucky!”_

“Can’t I?” Barnes asks, nuzzling the curve of his pectoral hopefully. “Always wanted to try out the new ride, drove me _crazy_ you wouldn’t let me do it right.” 

“We were on _suppressants_ ,” Steve says tightly, although he does nothing to dissuade the touch. “Wasn’t--wasn’t right. And if they’d caught us _you’d_ have been the one got blue-carded and dumped, and I--what would I have done without you?” 

“Saved the entire damn country, apparently,” Barnes snorts derisively, shaking his head. “What else?” 

“Died, mostly,” Steve says. 

_Omegas,_ Peggy reflects in exasperation, barely resisting the urge to bite one of them again. Or both of them, perhaps. 

“If you hadn’t noticed, neither of you is dead and the country still needs saved every other week,” she informs them dryly. It’s not a surprise they’d think that way, though. They never really came home and dealt with the long haul of a “normal” life intermingled with the fight; the world without a war, and the constant battles going on anyway. 

She knows damn well Steve never got anywhere near “normal” after he woke up, and it’s not like Barnes is in a place to try yet. 

“Mm,” Barnes says, hiding his face against Steve’s chest for a moment before laughing again, the sound weak and strange. Peggy wants to kiss it out of his mouth and not give it back until it’s in better condition, but settles for kissing his back again. 

Her lipstick leaves another perfect mark, she can’t help but notice, as fresh and perfect as if she’d just applied it. 

Kids. 

“Tell us how we can touch you,” she says, laying a hand on Steve’s hip over the thin strap of his underwear; imagining her lip-print there, split between cotton and skin. 

“I--any way,” Steve says, shaking his head helplessly. “Whatever you want.” 

“Knot him,” Barnes says immediately, testing their tie with an impatient squirm. Peggy puts a hand on his stomach to still him, breathing out roughly. 

“If he’d like that,” she says, voice careful. 

“You just fucked me three times in _twenty minutes_ , Carter,” Barnes says with a laugh, dropping his head against the bed. “He’s gonna fucking _love_ it.” 

“I’m not a damn teenager,” Peggy mutters under her breath, nails digging in a little against his stomach. It wasn’t _that_ quick--and anyway, she only knotted twice. Barnes inhales sharply, pressing into her nails, and then tests their tie again. He does it too hard this time, and Peggy hisses and pulls him back tightly. He laughs again, a punched-out, breathless thing that turns into a moan halfway through, then rolls his hips back into her. _“Christ!”_

“She’s so big, Stevie,” Barnes tells Steve with a crooked little grin that Steve so very visibly eats up like a starving man. Barnes moves his hand to the back of Steve’s and brings it down between his legs to touch his rim and her root, where he’s his softest and she’s her hardest and they’re both wet and warm. Peggy buries her groan in the back of his shoulder, holding on tight before he can take the opportunity to try and wriggle away again. “Feel it?” 

“I--yeah,” Steve says roughly, his fingers pressing in just a little tighter between them. It takes all of Peggy’s self-control not to sink her teeth into Barnes’s skin, but Barnes himself just purrs. 

“Yeah, go on,” he says, squeezing the back of Steve’s hand encouragingly. Steve works a finger into him with gentle, ruthless care, and Peggy feels like she might just black out from the way it makes Barnes tighten up. “Yeah, you see?” he rasps, grinning wider. “She’s gonna fill you up just this tight.” 

“Still pretty sure your fist was bigger, especially when I was five foot nothing,” Steve replies wryly. Barnes laughs in something that might actually be delight and Peggy shoots them both a dry look, and then Steve curls his finger and they both groan instead. 

She should’ve known to expect the behavior, really. It _is_ Steve. 

She’s not going to complain if he can make Barnes’s face look like that, though. 

_“Stevie!”_ Barnes gasps as Steve works in another finger, his own hands flying up to grab Steve’s shoulders and head falling back. It occurs to Peggy that it would be very easy to make him come again. 

She wonders how many times a super-soldier omega _can_ come. 

“Mmm, I think you’re delaying the main event again,” she says, reaching out to snap the band of Steve’s panties. He jerks in surprise, and Barnes laughs again and kisses him, messy and pretty and perfect. Steve kisses back and curls his fingers to make Barnes moan into it. 

“Fuck, what, _now_ you wanna stick your fist up there like it ain’t already occupied territory?” Barnes pants, breaking off the kiss and pressing their foreheads together. 

“Did you want him to?” Peggy asks, because delays or not, she _is_ an alpha. Barnes and Steve _both_ whimper, which is quite gratifying. “Mmm, perhaps next round. Your turn’s just about over, after all.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Barnes agrees urgently, and Peggy just barely catches him around the waist before he can test their tie again, squeezing roughly to keep him there as Steve carefully reclaims his fingers. Probably for the best, all things considered. 

Definitely for the best, since Barnes makes a heated noise and true to form just tries again. Peggy wraps the other arm around him too and squeezes tighter. She knows she can’t hold him, of course, not _really_ , but she can at least make her point, and--

“ _Fuck_ , Carter,” Barnes whines, dropping his hands to grab the back of her arms and clenching around her knot again, squirming even harder in her arms. She holds on tight and hisses through locked teeth, because if she opens her mouth when he’s acting like _this_ she will most certainly bite someone she should not. 

“Let the knot go down,” she manages roughly, still not trusting herself to let her teeth separate. 

“You gonna hold Steve like this too?” Barnes asks with a noticeable shudder. “You should. Feels good.” 

It is _so_ hard not to bite him _somewhere_. Everywhere. 

“Perhaps if he’s good, then,” Peggy says. She means it to come out wry, but it doesn’t quite make it. Steve certainly doesn’t look at her like it does, anyway. 

“He'll be good,” Barnes says, and tests her grip _again_ , the little minx. “You know he will. C’mon, Stevie, tell her. Alphas love that shit.”

“This from the omega who won’t stay still and _behave_ ,” Peggy mutters. Barnes laughs that imitation-laugh again, but she’s mostly sure he means it. Or just hopes, perhaps. 

“C’mon, Stevie, c’mere, c’mon,” Barnes coaxes, luring Steve in closer with his hands and dropping little kisses on his jaw and throat. Peggy imagines for a second what would happen if he had an episode while knotted and pinned in between them like this, and then very calmly files all subsequent thoughts in her mental trash bin. The point is moot. “Tell her. For me, please?” 

“I’ll be good,” Steve murmurs, glancing just past Barnes’s face to look Peggy in the eye. Something burns rough and ruthless in her chest, but she ignores it. 

Hearts break. That’s what hearts do. 

“I know you’ll be good,” she tells him lowly, reaching out to cup his face. He lets her, which she wasn’t quite sure he would. He even tilts his head into it, although he doesn’t make a sound. Steve Rogers is quiet in bed, apparently. She’d never expected to learn that about him. 

“Carter,” Barnes says, expression suddenly alert as he twists to look back at her. She takes a moment to realize why, but then he clenches around her clit again and she realizes--her knot’s softened, at least a little. 

_“Carefully,”_ she says warningly, and loosens the arm around his stomach. Barnes stays still, watching her intently, and this time she’s the one to test the tie. He relaxes, and her knot pops out not quite as easily as it could, but easily enough. 

“Ohhhhh,” Barnes groans, dropping his head back against the bed as his eyes fall shut. Come and slick drip down his thighs, and Peggy briefly loses focus watching. They should clean him up, but she can’t help suspecting they won’t. “I like that part. I _hate_ that part. Fuck.” 

“You smell so _good_ ,” Steve says helplessly. He lifts a hand as if he’s going to touch Barnes’s hole again, but stops himself. Peggy can’t imagine why, considering Barnes put his hand there himself a minute ago, but doesn’t question. 

“M’ _empty_ ,” Barnes whines, putting his own hand between his legs without even opening his eyes and rubbing restlessly at himself, but snatching it back a moment later with an even unhappier sound. 

“You get sensitive sometimes,” Steve murmurs sympathetically, stroking a hand through Barnes’s hair. Barnes smiles humorlessly but pushes into it. 

“You smell good too,” he says, eyes cracking open to look up at Steve. “I didn’t remember what you smelled like. But when you knocked the muzzle off--I could smell you, when you knocked the muzzle off. Wanted to put my face in your neck and _bite_.” 

“Okay,” Steve says helplessly, and then they kiss again and Peggy just leaves another lip-print on Barnes’s shoulder before sitting up, because anything else would end in _her_ bite. She looks down at them and watches them kiss a little less clumsily than before, and wants to pace the room and hallway to chase away any challengers. They’re fortunate the bed’s large, but the alpha in her replaces the hospital room with a proper den, just for a moment, and she imagines drawing the curtains on a four-poster shut and trapping the scent of two healthy omegas’ synched heats the same way a military-issue rut tent would’ve. 

She imagines that this body would ever last long enough to let that happen. 

Then she gathers it all up and dumps it in that same mental trash bin, because she’s had her life--a _good_ life--and this is not the place or time to want _more_ from it. This is a borrowed body and a borrowed moment from lives that were not meant to be a part of hers, or Gabe’s, or Howard’s, or anyone else she’s known. She’ll live it, and she’ll do the best she can for them, and then . . . 

And then _then_ , she supposes. 

As always. 

“You’re dreadful kissers,” she tells them, making her voice fond. The fondness isn’t a lie, so she assumes it works. 

“Prove it,” Barnes says, slanting his eyes up towards her as he grins against Steve’s mouth. They make a lovely picture. And a terrible one. 

“I have better things to do,” Peggy replies with mock-haughtiness, leaning over to run a hand up Steve’s thigh. “Don’t think I forgot that ‘whatever we want’, Rogers.” 

“Nobody forgot that,” Barnes says, grin going wicked and sharp. He grabs Steve’s arse again and Steve inhales roughly, his fingers tightening on Barnes’s arms. “Hey, it’s my turn to put my fingers in you, right? I can do that if I want?” 

“You can do _anything_ you want,” Steve swears, and Peggy’s pheromones flare. The other two immediately lock their focus in on her, eyes wide and expressions breathless with anticipation. 

She supposes she’d best live up to it. 

“Not yet,” she says, sliding down the bed as she shifts over to slip between their bodies. She strokes Steve’s thigh again, because what alpha would miss the opportunity? “First, _I’ll_ be doing anything I want.” 

“Yeah, okay,” Steve breathes, still staring at her. Barnes looks like he wants to jump one of them. Or both. 

“Excellent,” Peggy says firmly, then slides a hand between Steve’s knees. “Then roll onto your back and part these for me, won’t you?” 

“I--yeah, okay,” Steve manages again, and obeys with gratifying immediacy. Barnes makes an encouraging noise and slots in neatly against his side, wrapping an arm over Steve’s stomach and watching her with bright, intent eyes. 

She smiles at them, because of course they both deserve it, and then lowers her head to kiss up Steve’s perfectly-sculpted stomach. She wanted to do that even before it looked like this, and finally getting to makes her feel accomplished and powerful. 

The way his stomach flutters under her mouth as his pheromones flare in response to her own helps too, of course. 

She pushes her hands up his thighs and licks up the line of his abs, and Steve breathes out roughly and resettles against the bed. Barnes just sighs in contentment and lays his head on his shoulder, looking unexpectedly peaceful. Something like a child cuddled up with a beloved toy, although most specifically the kind of child Peggy had known during the Blitz. 

They still look lovely together. Lovelier, perhaps, and Peggy wants to believe it will last for them. That Barnes will recover and Steve will move on and they will do whatever it is they want to do--retire, run away, run to the _fight_. Whatever it is. 

All the things it is, for however long it can be. 

She kisses down low on Steve’s stomach and slips her fingers under the straps of his panties to slide over the hidden skin there, and he makes a very quiet noise and shuts his eyes, head falling back. Barnes takes the opportunity to nuzzle his throat; Peggy just keeps lavishing him with wet little kisses, scattering kiss-marks as she pleases and dragging her nails down his hips as she does. He doesn’t shift away or come up with an excuse or distraction, and she relishes being allowed to give him this much attention. 

Well. She’s about to give him a _little_ more attention than this. 

Peggy leans back just enough to look at the kiss-marks she’s left behind, the proof of her mouth and of Steve’s acceptance and reception of it, and the sight curls warmly in her gut and throbs hot and heavy in her clit. She only takes a moment, though, because as much as she loves the sight--well. 

It’s been a long, long time. 

“Anything, yes?” she says lightly, and then drops a quick little kiss against the head of his cock through the damp fabric of his panties. Although “soaked” might be a more accurate term, really. Steve mewls very, very quietly, and the sound makes her just the barest bit light-headed. 

Peggy doesn’t mean to growl, but she _growls_. Steve inhales sharply and Barnes purrs against his jaw, sliding a hand down the other’s stomach. His fingers smear Peggy’s lip-prints and come away red, and also leave red on the thin white cotton of Steve’s panties just the same as her mouth did as they fondle the eager, perky cock that’s tenting them. Peggy watches intently for as long as she can hold herself back, and then Barnes draws a finger up Steve’s cock and Steve pushes up into the touch, head falling back again and mouth working soundlessly. 

She has absolutely no desire to hold back, seeing him like that. She drops her head to mouth at the stained fabric just past Barnes’s hand and Steve _trembles_ , his cock shameless and gorgeous against her lips and Barnes’s fingers. He holds himself still, though, not pushing up again or pleading for anything more than what they’re giving him, and Peggy hooks her hands around under his thighs and nuzzles the length of him. His thighs tremble harder and his cock twitches against her cheek, and she smells the resulting rush of sweet, needy pheromones that pours off him. 

And the resulting rush of sweet, needy _slick_ that pours _out_ of him, soaking the crotch of his panties so thoroughly that they might as well not be there at all, for how much they impede her vision. 

She puts her hands under his hips to coax them up and puts her mouth there, tongue pressing the fabric back against his poor neglected hole and tasting him with only the barest traces of inference from the cotton. He lets out another cracked little mewl, and she rumbles approval and satisfaction and sucks the taste of his slick out of the fabric under her mouth, nothing chemical or regretful there at all. 

Steve’s pheromones aren’t drugged-down like Barnes, but they aren’t heat pheromones either, and Peggy didn’t expect them to be so strong. She’s not complaining, not even a little, but her clit’s already heavy and she feels like--it’s _not_ rut, what she feels like, but it burns too hot to be just regular arousal, at this point. She’s knotted twice already; regular arousal just wouldn’t hold _up_. 

Definitely something else the kids got wrong, she thinks, and then forces herself to push aside as she flexes her tongue against the cotton over Steve’s hole again. He exhales loudly and his pheromones flare up even hotter. Peggy’s starting to wonder how much more intense they can get. 

Peggy wants to _know_ how much more intense they can get. 

“ _Lord_ , you smell delicious,” she rumbles roughly, pulling one of her hands out from underneath his hips to tug the crotch of his panties aside just enough to get her tongue against bare skin, and Steve starts panting like he’s just run half a dozen marathons, or however much it’d take to wear him out these days. 

Peggy wants to know how much. Peggy wants to _do_ it. She drags her nose and lips and mouth over his hole and his slick spills over her tongue and he gives up that same little mewl again, that same little sound that just might _kill_ her, stuttering up into the contact. Peggy digs her nails in against the small of his back and dips her tongue into him without preamble, moving it in fast little fluttering motions that make him writhe. She licks around his rim and curls it inside him and relishes every little gasp and shudder as rare and precious and _priceless_. 

They always wanted something from each other. She can’t help reacting so strongly to getting--anything, really. Anything at all from him would’ve done this to her. 

“I liked her mouth too,” Barnes says; when Peggy glances up, he’s nuzzling the corner of Steve’s jaw. “Did you ever do this to me? I think I did you a couple times, but I don’t remember if we did it the other way.” 

“I--yeah, I did,” Steve rasps, squeezing his eyes shut as Peggy makes a point of doing something especially creative with her tongue. This conversation deserves _every_ creative thing she can do with her tongue, quite frankly. 

“I don’t remember,” Barnes says, looking down at her. She can’t quite tell if the way he licks his lips is deliberate or subconscious. “How’s he taste?” 

“Why?” Peggy asks mildly, adjusting her grip on Steve’s tugged-aside underwear to rub a fingertip across his hole. “Do you need a reminder?” 

_“Yeah,”_ Barnes says immediately, eyes lighting up wild again as he pushes himself up. Peggy leans up just enough to let him kiss her, careful to be sure Steve can see. Barnes purrs roughly and goes at her mouth like he’s trying to bite it off her face, and Steve chokes at the sight as his hips twitch up restlessly against nothing. Peggy rewards his obvious appreciation by sliding a finger into him and crooking it in extremely deliberate fashion. Steve doesn’t make a sound, but his leg jerks sharply and he’s breathing so hard Peggy’s surprised he hasn’t knocked someone over. 

Barnes kisses her with a ridiculous amount of little kitten-licks involved, clearly approaching the job of tasting Steve both seriously and _thoroughly_ , or maybe just that eager to be tasting him. Peggy wouldn’t blame him for that; Steve’s slick is heady and sweet and as good as anything she’s ever had in her mouth. 

“I remember that,” Barnes breathes between licks and kisses, his eyes hooded and heated. “That tastes really--I remember that.” 

“It’s new for me,” Peggy replies, keeping her own tone conversational as she slips another finger into Steve, who lets out a stuttering breath and clenches tightly around them, pulling his knees up higher. 

And sliding a hand up Barnes’s back, too. Which is . . . which is something Peggy can’t help _Noticing_ , for lack of a better word. Or maybe it’s just the intent way that Steve does it, the close way he watches the path of his own hand and the way Barnes’s spine curves under the pressure. 

It occurs to her that Steve must have at least as good a view of Barnes’s hole as she has of his, except Barnes’s must still be wet and dripping and very obviously fresh from a knotting. 

Which--that’s a thought, isn’t it. 

“Pleasant view?” she asks Steve with a mild expression. He startles a little, looking embarrassed at being caught out; Barnes looks back over his shoulder with a puzzled expression that quickly clears, and leers back at Steve upon realizing just where he’s been looking. 

_“Stevie,”_ he purrs, wiggling his hips enticingly as Steve’s eyes go dark and hot, even past the flush on his face. Peggy could kill someone over the way watching them act like that together makes her feel. “You want a reminder too?” 

“I didn’t forget,” Steve rasps, his jaw tight. Barnes’s expression flickers briefly. Steve pushes his hand up his back again and Barnes is still for a second, then moves back out of reach. Steve doesn’t so much as lean after him. 

“It can wait, then,” Barnes says, sitting back and curling his legs underneath himself as he leans back on his hands. Something about the way he’s sitting looks a bit like someone posed him that way--as if he’s on display. There’s more care in the pose than she’d expect from a bad flashback, though, and Steve’s fingers are curling like they used to do when he had a pencil in them. 

Peggy wonders, not for the first time, _exactly_ what Barnes remembers. 

“I imagine it will,” she says, then curls her fingers meaningfully inside Steve again. He jolts, eyes widening, and she wouldn’t be surprised if he’d forgotten she was touching him that intimately. Her pride as an alpha might’ve been bothered when she’d really been the age she looks now, but at this point she knows better. “Just a little while, though.” 

“A little,” Steve echoes breathlessly, staring up at her in a way that could soothe _any_ alpha’s pride. Barnes makes an inquiring noise and cocks his head, looking at her with just as much fixation. Peggy spares a moment to bask in the attention, vain as an omega herself, then gets back to work and starts rocking her fingers, deeper and steadier this time. Steve grunts, head dropping back against the mattress, and she drops hers too so she can kiss him around her fingers. 

He _moans_ , and it puts a fire up her spine. Not rut, still, but God, it _burns_ like it. And it gives her the drive to eat him _out_ like it, relentless and demanding; it gives her the opportunity to learn he likes it harder and harsher than Barnes does, if the increased urgency of his reactions is anything to go by. 

And it makes thinking about how him liking _this_ harsher might translate to how he likes being fucked burn something up in her too. 

“I don’t remember this,” Barnes murmurs. Peggy’s mouth is occupied, so she doesn’t say anything. Steve tries to answer him, she thinks, but doesn’t pull off a coherent reply. He can’t be blamed--Peggy’s mouth is _very_ occupied. He doesn’t seem troubled to be ignored and just keeps watching them from the other side of the mattress, so Peggy puts all her attention into eating Steve out and making him feel as good as he deserves, especially after waiting so long. 

He doesn’t get any noisier no matter what she does, but he definitely reacts more strongly, his body restless and urgent underneath her mouth and fingers, and it’s obvious how hard he has to hold himself back from more. 

Peggy _wants_ the more, so she twists her fingers inside him and slides another in. Steve takes it effortlessly and she’s sure she could put in another; sure she could get her whole hand inside him just like Barnes used to and knot him like _that_. But that’s not what Barnes has been asking her to do and not what she wants either, and Steve--

Steve Rogers who’d never ask for a damn thing said “anything you want” and promised to be _good_ for her. She could never give him less than all of herself after that, assuming she ever could’ve before. 

But this first. 

She licks into him between her fingers and digs her nails into the small of his back, guiding his hips up just that little bit into a better angle for her to work, and he digs his heels into the bed and shakes and shakes and _shivers_ under her attentions, his killingly sweet pheromones spiralling higher and higher and dragging hers with. Barnes is purring near-constantly, steady and raspy; when Peggy spares a glance for him, he’s watching them with wild, bright eyes, his pretty cock all perked up and his weight all braced on his metal arm, the real one’s fingers working between his thighs. 

She rumbles her approval at the sight against Steve’s slick-sweetened skin and he makes a hitched noise and jerks against the mattress, grabbing the back of her head for the first time; she pursues the moment of surrender ruthlessly and _devours_ him until both of his hands are tangled roughly in her hair and his hips are thrusting up so hard for her that it’s all she can do to keep him from bucking her off. It’s worth it. It’s _more_ than worth it, to see him losing that painful amount of control and to see how much faith he can put in them when he just allows himself to. 

She could never allow herself to be less than what he needs, when he can do that. 

He comes with an aborted little cry, fingers digging into her hair and legs flying up to lock around her shoulders, and Peggy grunts in alarm and instinctively braces herself--delighted as she is to satisfy him so thoroughly that he’d lose track of himself, he’s twice her damn _size_. For a second she thinks her arm will give out at the unexpected weight but bullheaded instincts she’d half-forgotten she used to have slot into her muscles and hold fast before she can think better of it. To her surprise, holding him up is hardly even a struggle. 

Then she feels the mattress shift and hears a familiar, heated purr and remembers the other body in the bed. Bless Barnes, he must’ve lunged over to put a hand under Steve’s back with hers; it’s the only thing that would’ve kept her from going face-first into the mattress. 

“Good boy,” she breathes raggedly, reclaiming the slick and sticky fingers inside him to put another hand underneath his hips, and Steve lets out a very quiet whine, going limp and heavy as he releases her to shudder through the aftershocks of orgasm. She lets him down carefully with Barnes’s help and then straightens up, shaking her tangled hair back out of her face before looking down at them again. Steve is flushed all the way down his chest, his mouth half-open and eyes heavy-lidded and dazed, and Barnes is--

Barnes is not any closer than he was before, nearly as dreamy-eyed as Steve and grinning over at her from in the exact same pose he was a moment ago, obviously not having moved an inch. 

Wait--what? 

“Hot _damn_ , Carter,” Barnes breathes reverently before biting his lip, face flushed and thighs squeezed tight around his own hand. “That looks even better than it felt.” 

“What?” Peggy asks inanely, not following. Steve puts a hand over her slick-soaked one and squeezes pleadingly to get her attention again, and she looks back to him and that fire up her spine blossoms anew at the sight of him spread out limp and breathless and still reaching out for more of her. 

That fire up her spine _roars_. 

“Oh, _darling_ ,” she breathes, forgetting all the rest of it in favor of pushing in to kiss him. He gives her another one of those quiet little mewls in the space between their mouths and she rumbles back the exact same way she did watching Barnes touch himself. Steve’s breath hitches and a very gratifying shiver goes through him; Peggy chases after it by putting her hands all over him, groping up his chest and down to his squeeze his arse again. She remembers how roughly Barnes did it before and tries to match it, and at least gets close enough to get yet another mewl out of Steve. 

She could listen to that little noise until she went deaf, she thinks between kisses. She probably doesn’t even have the hearing to catch it in her real body anymore, which just makes it more valuable now. And perhaps Barnes was too sensitive to be touched much after his last orgasm, but she doubts Steve will have the same problem after just his first. 

Judging by how rough he’s liked to be treated so far, she’s not sure he’d have the same problem even if he _were_ oversensitive. 

She pushes up his thin undershirt and pinches one of his nipples to test the theory, and Steve’s eyes roll back in his head. 

“Harder,” he gasps immediately; she obeys, and twists it sharply. He sighs, lashes fluttering shut, and makes another hitched noise when she does it again. “I-- _oh_.” 

“Steve,” Peggy says, her voice rougher than she means it to be, and he opens his eyes again and looks up at her, expression dazed and dreamy. Her clit _throbs_. “Still ‘anything’?” 

“Anything,” he repeats instantly, eyes clearing just enough. She thinks, again, how much he seems to like what she’d otherwise think was _too_ much. 

“Roll over,” she says, putting a hand on his flank and pushing pointedly. He does, inhaling sharply again in the process and landing more on his knees than on his stomach, hips already tilted back beeseechingly towards her. 

Well, if she’d had second thoughts about what he liked, that would’ve taken care of them quite nicely. 

“It won’t be like a hand,” she warns him, because even if an omega’s body can’t tell the difference between a fist and a knot, it’s still a different kind of intimacy. 

“Please,” Steve says, reaching back to tug down his panties, soaked and gorgeous mess that they are. Peggy puts a hand over his to stop him, then hooks her thumb into the crotch of them and tugs them aside again instead. “Peggy--” he chokes, and she leans over him and pushes her clit into him on a long, slow slide. _“Peggy!”_

“Told you she was big,” Barnes laughs breathlessly. Steve grabs the pillow off the top of the bed and buries his face and steady rush of whimpering both in it, but can’t hide the way his pheromones flare in greedy desperation. He tries to push back for more of her sooner; she puts her hands on his hips and holds him. And he lets her. 

Or--and she holds him, maybe. She’s not . . . she isn’t quite sure, at the moment. 

“Oh God, oh Peggy please, please please _move_ \--” Steve babbles, lifting his head just enough to speak, and Peggy braces a hand on his shoulder and snaps her hips in. He _sobs_. “Don’t stop, don’t stop, please don’t stop!” 

“Told you,” Barnes says again, the reverence creeping back into his voice. Peggy can’t bring herself to disappoint either of them, and makes her next few thrusts go all the way to the root. Steve buries another litany of little cries into the pillow and Barnes starts whining, squirming in place and very obviously working his fingers inside himself again. Peggy glances over to him, but she can’t smell his pheromones worth a _damn_ over the room-filling rush of Steve’s. She suspects his heat is going to need tending again soon, though, and even knowing no sympathy rut’s coming to help her handle it, she can’t help the way the thought burns inside her anyway. 

“Pleasant view?” she inquires again, voice as as mild as she can keep it with Steve writhing and whimpering for more underneath her, which isn’t very. Barnes whimpers too, nodding urgently, and she catches a glimpse of him pushing another finger into himself and her own come dribbling out of him as he does. “Oh, look at _you_.” 

Barnes shakes his head, struggling to breathe steadily, and Peggy croons low and raspy in response and snaps her hips in _hard_ to make Steve yelp. Another fresh rush of pheromones pours off his skin and Barnes inhales sharply and leans forward so far he nearly falls over. 

“Good boy,” Peggy husks, reaching out to stroke his face. She doesn’t mean to tease, she’d _never_ tease him, but he’s still not quite close enough to touch more than that. 

“Bucky,” Steve pants, lifting his face again to look back at them. His expression is different this time, intent and hungrier, and Barnes squeezes his thighs together again, his arm visibly flexing between them. 

“Can wait,” he rasps, eyes screwed shut tight. “I can wait, alpha, I _can_.” 

“Don’t _have_ to,” Steve says, reaching out across the covers in a fumbling attempt to get a grip on Barnes. Peggy hooks her hand around the back of his neck and pulls to make him overbalance so Steve can get his own hands on him, and Barnes starts keening the second his forehead hits the mattress, the new position putting his hips up in the air as if he’s presenting for someone but no one behind him to appreciate it. 

Peggy has no doubts as to how lovely a sight he makes, though, and she’s sure Steve doesn’t either. 

“C’mere, c’mon,” Steve husks, palm skimming the back of Barnes’s shoulders, and Barnes crawls to him. He doesn’t even take his fingers out of himself. Peggy squeezes the back of his neck once and lets go as soon as Steve can wrap an arm around it instead, Barnes shuddering into the contact. “It’s all right, Buck, we’ve got you. Gonna take care of you.” 

“I don’t _want_ you to, I can _wait_ ,” Barnes chokes, hiding his face in Steve’s shoulder as he screws his eyes shut. Peggy should really stop fucking Steve for this conversation, but he doesn’t seem any more inclined to discourage the behavior than she is to stop it. 

“Don’t gotta wait,” Steve says roughly, his fingers digging in on the back of Barnes’s neck just the same way Peggy’s did. Barnes whimpers and pushes up tight against him, and Peggy takes that as an excuse to fuck him harder again--so he gasps, so his body moves against the bed. So his body moves against _Barnes’s_ body, and makes them both keen. 

“Stevie, Stevie, _Carter_ ,” Barnes sobs, burrowing in as tight against Steve’s side as he can, wrapping his free arm around his back and grinding his neglected cock into his thigh. Peggy runs a hand up his flank and down over his hip and the curve of his arse to catch against his slick-sticky fingers and push in with them on Barnes’s next thrust, making him keen even louder and squirm helplessly between two points of stimulation. 

“You’re good, Buck, you got it, it’s okay,” Steve murmurs into his hair, own voice breathy and ragged and hitching every time Peggy hits him just right. She’d be proud of how many times that’s been, if she had the attention span to be. 

“Yes, you’re _wonderful_ , soldier,” she agrees in a low rumble. Barnes doesn’t even try to muffle his hot little keens and cries, just pushing his forehead against Steve’s shoulder and dragging his shining metal fingers down his back, leaving bright red lines so close to the color of Peggy’s lipstick that she wonders if he hasn’t gotten his fingers in it again. 

She matches the pace of her fingers to the pace of her hips to make it easier for Barnes, and Steve mumbles breathless praises between peppering kisses into his hair. Barnes comes between them before Peggy’s knot is even half-blown, and she doesn’t blame him a whit for it. His slick soaks her hand and his come smears across Steve’s thigh, and he shakes so hard she’s not sure what mind he’ll come out of it in. 

It’s very hard to care about that, though. 

“So good, Bucky,” Steve says roughly against his temple, squeezing the arm he has around him tight. Barnes whines and squeezes back without lifting his head, still shaking. Peggy slips her fingers out of him as his own fall out gracelessly, then strokes a gentle hand up his back and _slams_ into Steve. He grunts, bracing himself against the mattress to keep from jarring Barnes, and pushes back into her next thrust with a gasp. 

Barnes whines again, very quietly, and presses messy, open-mouthed kisses up Steve’s throat as he rubs his thighs together. Peggy keeps stroking his back soothingly and fucks Steve with short, brutal thrusts that knock more mewls and moans out of him. He keeps holding himself steady, hardly moving an inch underneath her hips, and something in her--the _alpha_ in her, she’s sure--takes it as a challenge and _thrusts_. Steve makes a shocked noise and nearly hits his head against the headboard, just barely getting his hand there first. 

“Fuuuuuck,” Barnes breathes, and a second later they’re all fumbling lower down the bed, Peggy trying not to laugh guiltily. She hadn’t expected to catch him that much by surprise. 

“Sorry,” she says. “All right then?” 

“Don’t _stop_ ,” Steve groans, which Peggy takes as a “yes”. She thrusts just as hard as the last time and Steve slips again, Barnes hooking a hand under his ribs just in time to keep him from collapsing outright. 

“Flatterer,” Peggy hums indulgently, kissing the back of his shoulder and skimming a hand up his side before picking up her pace. Steve wraps an arm over the back of his head and starts cursing into the pillow. 

“You’re gonna bruise him,” Barnes says in obvious pleasure, leaning up just enough to watch her clit move in and out of Steve with a hungry expression. 

“I doubt I can,” Peggy snorts breathlessly, shaking her head. 

“Bruised me,” Barnes murmurs, touching first his hip and then the back of his neck before tugging his hair aside to bare it. Peggy blinks, almost losing her pace for a second, and then realizes he’s right--there are faint purpling smears on his skin, faint traces of handprints too narrow to be Steve’s. 

Something _violent_ throbs in her. 

_“God,”_ Steve groans, head turned just enough to eat up the sight of those bruises, those _marks_. “How’d you even do that to-- _please_ do that.” 

“She couldn’t do it before?” Barnes asks, just barely frowning. 

“No, not--no,” Steve manages roughly, clearing his throat. “That’s--that’s new.” 

“Felt so good when you kept holding me down I just figured you always had,” Barnes murmurs, glancing up to Peggy’s face for a moment before looking back to the bruises on his hip and tracing his fingers over them again with a shrug. “Guess I wouldn’t have known anyway, though, huh.” 

“I don’t--” Peggy stops herself, and just-- _doesn’t_. Can’t. Whatever stupid thing those kids did when they made this body, she just doesn’t have the room to process it right now. Not with Steve under her and Barnes shifting restlessly beside them and _both_ of them looking at her. With Steve squirming back for more of her clit and Barnes tracing the marks she left on his skin and both them alive and mostly well and _with her_. 

She doesn’t give a damn about the body, when she has that. 

“Peggy?” Steve manages raspily, tightening around her, and she realizes her pace has stuttered. 

“Sorry,” she murmurs, pressing another kiss to the back of his shoulder as she corrects herself--no higher than that. Nowhere to tempt her teeth too much. “You’re all right, darling, I’ve got you.” 

“I know,” Steve says, and Peggy just-- _fucks_ him. That’s all. Longer and slower and as deep as he’ll let her in, because that’s what feels right for the moment. Barnes starts purring to himself and putting his hands all over Steve, rubbing up the length of his arms and smoothing over his chest and tweaking his nipples through his rucked-up shirt, and Peggy appreciates the assistance because it leaves her able to put all her attention into hitting just the right angle inside him. 

And also appreciates the assistance because of how it makes Steve clench up tight around her, because of goddamn _course_ she does. 

“Please,” Steve chokes. Peggy bears all her weight down on his back and Barnes slips a hand into his panties to rub his cock with another blissed-out purr, and Steve comes with a shocked little mew, head jerking up and body tightening _almost_ hard enough to make Peggy come too. Maybe if she hadn’t already gone so many times. He gasps underneath her, near-melting into the bed, and she follows him down and can’t help but imagine that this is what it would’ve been like then, if not for the crash. Partnering Barnes through a heat, that’s one thing, but this--

It’s something else, without heat involved. 

Isn’t it? 

Except there _is_ heat involved, she remembers as Barnes licks Steve’s come off his fingers, his eyes glazed and breath coming quick and ragged. There is most _definitely_ heat involved. 

Steve presses his face into the pillow and inhales shakily, then reaches back to put a shaking hand on Peggy’s hip and keep her still. She obliges, of course, although it kills her a little. It’s not as if she was planning to fuck him while he needs a moment to recover, though. 

“C’mere,” Steve rasps, shifting his weight to pull at Barnes, who follows his guidance without the slightest trace of resistance or hesitation. Peggy’s clit slips out of him as he moves and that really _could_ kill her, but she just keeps a hand on the small of his back. His thighs are shaky and weak and covered in slick where she didn’t knot him to keep it in, even past his underwear slipping more or less back into place, and he smells like a dream. 

Still, she should’ve known--as _if_ Steve Rogers would allow himself a moment to recover. 

“I can wait,” Barnes says, sounding a little dazed. 

“Don’t want you to,” Steve retorts, pushing him back against the headboard. 

“You’ve been so good. Why would we want you to wait?” Peggy says reasonably, but Barnes just makes an unhappy noise and presses back tighter against the bed. 

“Ain’t my turn,” he insists, shaking his head. 

“You’re right,” Steve says firmly, putting his hands on his thighs and pushing them apart, tugging Barnes’s hips into the appropriate angle. Barnes’s eyes widen. “It’s _mine_.” 

“Oh,” Barnes breathes, and then Steve grabs his hips and puts his mouth between his legs and Barnes _keens_ , legs immediately hooking over those broad golden shoulders and hands flying up to fist in Steve’s hair. “ _Oh!_ Steve, Steve, oh God oh Godddd, baby, please please please-- _oh!_ ” 

“Good boy,” Peggy croons, which just makes Barnes keen louder. “You’ve been so kind to share. You’ve _both_ shared so well, I’m quite impressed.” 

“Carter,” Bucky whimpers, forcing his eyes open to give her a desperate look and then breaking off to yelp over whatever Steve just did to his poor needy hole. It must’ve been impressive, from how it makes him buck up for more. 

“ _Such_ a good boy,” Peggy croons again, leaning over to stroke Barnes’s hair back out of his face and earning an endearingly clumsy kiss against her wrist for the gesture. Her clit is so hard she really _might_ knot air before this is over. 

“Please,” Barnes manages, and then starts whimpering again and pushes his shoulders back into the wall and his hips up into Steve’s mouth, fingers twisting in his hair. 

Steve purrs against him and Barnes’s whimpering turns hitched and desperate, one of his legs jerking roughly and thumping a heel hard against the back of Steve’s shoulder blade. Steve grunts at the impact and Peggy grabs Barnes’s ankle without thinking, squeezing it tight and holding his foot down. He starts panting so hard he’s practically hyperventilating and tries to jerk out of her grip, except he’s obviously just testing it. She holds on harder in response, and Barnes shudders violently, head knocking back against the wall above the headboard and left hand twisting back to grab onto the headboard itself. 

The headboard _groans_. 

“Good Lord,” Peggy says faintly, staring at the place where Barnes’s metal fingers have warped the clearly inferior metal of the headboard. 

“Feels good,” he whines, hair falling in his face as he tips his head forward to look at her with those dazed eyes again. There’s that wildness in the back of them, too, and all she wants is to see it thrive in him. 

And, well--there’s one other thing she wants, she’s reminded as Steve bumps back against her accidentally. 

“Knot him,” Barnes pants as his eyes flick down to Steve’s face, clearly of the same mindset. “Tell her you want it, Stevie, c’mon, tell her how good her clit felt. Her knot’s even _better_ , I promise. You believe me, right? I’m your friend?” 

“Yeah, I believe you,” Steve replies quietly as he rocks two fingers into Barnes and makes the other tremble, voice raspy. “You’re my friend.” 

“Okay?” Barnes says, giving Peggy a desperate look. She doesn’t have a proper answer for him, not with that face on, but when she curls her fingers against Steve’s hip he pushes back against her with a meaningful little wriggle that is-- _enormously_ distracting, frankly. 

“Of course,” she murmurs, tugging Steve’s panties down just low enough to expose his pretty hole again. It might be even prettier now that it’s been fucked; she can’t imagine how good it’ll look once he’s been _knotted_. Steve just works another finger into Barnes as steady as anything, as if he hasn’t heard a word they’ve said or wasn’t just wagging his _arse_ at her, the shameless brat. 

Peggy _loves_ it. 

“This time I’m going to come,” she tells him casually, and that-- _that_ he reacts to, shoulders visibly jerking. She’d gone a little soft without any direct attention, but that reaction alone takes care of the problem. 

“You’ll like it, Stevie, feels so _good_ ,” Barnes swears immediately, which while an admittedly simple endorsement is something Peggy appreciates hearing anyway. 

“I’d hope so, after all the build-up,” Steve says, glancing back to spare her a faint smile. 

“I’ll do my best, of course,” Peggy replies, voice light, then grabs his hip with her free hand to drag him back onto her clit. He hisses in surprise, tensing _beautifully_ , and she digs her nails in, wondering both if he’ll bruise too and how long those bruises might last if he does. Longer than this body, she’s sure. 

Or she’ll _make_ sure. 

One or the other. 

“Good boy,” she says, and fucks him. Steve grunts into Barnes’s thigh and then gets back to work between his legs, twisting his fingers inside him as he drags his tongue up his cock. Barnes’s ankle jerks in Peggy’s grip, but not hard enough to pull away, and she squeezes it just to make the point and earns a moan for the treatment. 

“Fuck fuck _fuck_ ,” Barnes swears, knocking his head back against the wall again, the metal headboard groaning anew. Peggy glances up at him briefly, more occupied with hunching lower over Steve so she can get her free hand skimming up his stomach to shove his shirt back up and drag heavily across his chest and stomach. Steve pushes his chest down into her hand; the headboard warps under Barnes’s. Both of these facts _burn_ in her. 

“ _Such_ good boys,” she murmurs lowly. She rolls one of Steve’s nipples between her fingers and he makes breathy noises against Barnes’s cock, sweet and soft and seeking. Barnes is far noisier, even without counting the headboard, but if asked Peggy honestly wouldn’t be able to choose which reaction she preferred. 

Then again, why would she need to develop a preference when she’s getting both? 

Barnes _keens_ , and Peggy looks up to find Steve having worked all four fingers into him and now carefully tucking his thumb in against his palm, looking up at Barnes with an assessing expression and very clearly waiting for some manner of confirmation. 

“Steve!” Barnes chokes, jerking back against the headboard. The whole _thing_ creaks this time. 

“Oh, _please_ do,” Peggy breathes, staring fixatedly at their joining, and Barnes nods frantically. It’s the confirmation Steve was waiting for, and so he does: slowly and gently and _inexorably_. Barnes starts making high, helpless noises, eyes rolling back, and Steve’s hand breaches him to the wrist. 

It’s _gorgeous_. 

“Bucky,” Steve murmurs, pressing a brief kiss to his cock with a sweet little purr. Barnes just keeps keening, body trembling helplessly. 

Peggy rolls her hips to rub her slow-growing knot into the most sensitive parts of Steve, whose purring rapidly devolves into more of those little mewling sounds. She puts her mouth all over the back of his shoulders and not a centimeter higher, not a _millimeter_ , and he puts his mouth all over Barnes’s cock and no doubt is touching all the most sensitive parts of him too, no matter whether he’s moving his hand inside him or not. Peggy may be fairly well-endowed, but no knot outside of a blue magazine could ever hold up to the size of an eighteen-stone super-soldier’s fist. 

And even if that fact weren’t blindingly obvious, Barnes is being very vocal about his appreciation either way. 

“Steve, Steve Steve _Steve_!” he chants desperately, repeats like a curse and a prayer, over and over and over until the name loses all meaning, until the name is the _only_ meaning, until he comes just like that and _wails_ with it. 

He tries to lock Steve’s fist. She can see it in the way he tenses, the way his shoulders hunch and his thighs draw up tighter; can feel it in the way his ankle trembles in her grip. 

Can hear it in the way that Steve sighs very, very softly. 

Peggy bares her teeth against Steve’s spine for one liquid and burning instant, for one Molotov cocktail of a moment, and then murmurs a thousand praises for whichever one of them will take them--for both of them, so much for both of them, perhaps always for both of them. She drags her hand down Steve’s stomach to touch his neglected cock and rolls her hips into his because her clit’s knotted up too fat to let her thrust anymore, and he mewls and sighs and mewls and sighs and mewls and _sighs_. 

Steve comes all over Peggy’s hand and around her clit, nearly noiseless. His body tightens around her and she comes too, inside him and so easily, long and slow. She loses her grip on Barnes and collapses by millimeters atop Steve, who sinks gracelessly to the mattress underneath her weight. As if it matters to him at all; as if it is even the _slightest_ weight to him. 

As if she’s enough to crush him. 

“Peggy,” Steve mumbles as his head rolls to the side, a dazed and smeared quality to his eyes. He shifts his hips just enough to pull at their tie and she hisses against his shoulder and he shudders against the sheets. _“Peggy.”_

“Darling,” she manages, breathless and heavy. She doesn’t want to move at all. She might not move until this borrowed body runs out, whatever that implies or requires. “Oh, _darling_.” 

She wants to bite him. She wants him to have lived. She wants _them_ to have lived. 

She wants Gabe to have lived. 

She wants--so many things, at the moment, none of which she has deserved or earned, all of which she deserves and has earned, none and all of which are relevant. None of which matter, all of which _crushingly matter_. 

“Darling,” she says one more time, kissing the back of Steve’s shoulder. 

And no higher. 

They don’t say anything else. Peggy doesn’t sleep, but she loses a little time. Not much--her knot’s still fat and heavy, still locked tight inside Steve--but a little. Enough time for the aftershocks to fade, for Steve’s pheromones to soften and recede. 

She _would’ve_ slept, likely, but Barnes interrupts. 

“Lemme up, Stevie,” he murmurs raspily, and then Peggy gets to watch the burningly lovely sight of Steve very carefully working his slick-soaked hand out of him and Barnes’s hole instinctively trying to lock it again and keep him inside, even though he’d asked himself. The sight of him so wet and well-fucked puts a shiver through her, and when he closes his legs she has to stifle a groan of disappointment. 

Then he puts his hands on Steve’s shoulders to coax them both into rolling onto their sides and slides down the bed, and “disappointment” becomes the precise _last_ thing on her mind. 

“Buck--” Steve starts roughly, and then moans as Barnes puts his mouth around his soft, well-wrung cock without a drop of preamble. Barnes wraps his hands around Steve’s hips and Peggy immediately covers them with her own, because no other response makes more sense. Steve is already gasping, clenching tight around her knot, and she tucks her face into his shoulder and lets one hand wander up under his shirt again. 

It doesn’t take long, between the two of them. Steve breathes in quick little staccato beats and Barnes licks and sucks and kisses in all the right places, and Peggy puts her hands over every right place that Barnes can’t reach. Steve clutches up around her and she keeps her teeth behind her lips and Barnes gives a muffled purr, and Steve comes again just like that, just that easily. 

That they can make him come that easily--it _kills_ something in her, that they can make him come that easily, once he’s stopped holding himself back. 

Steve pulls Barnes up into his arms and kisses his wet, sticky mouth, and Peggy wraps an arm around their broad sides, pulling him in close. She watches their kissing grow lazy with heavy, drowsy eyes, and basks in the warmth of the low-burning coals in her gut. 

This time, she sleeps. They do too. That’s only reasonable, at this point. 

Waking up is the surprise. 

She really hadn’t expected to, is the thing. Not still shaped like _this_. 

Peggy shifts back carefully, deflated knot slipping out of Steve, and is briefly distracted by the hypnotic sight of a drip of her come doing the same. Steve stirs just enough to whimper in disappointment, and Barnes tightens his grip on him in his sleep. They’re wound together tightly and look like they would sooner sink than let go. 

“Shhh,” Peggy murmurs, stroking Steve’s shoulder. He settles, but his eyes slit open and peer up at her hazily, his lips just barely parting. 

Whatever he might be about to say, she can’t take it. Not a word of it. 

Not _anything_. 

“Shhh,” she husks again, squeezing his shoulder and grabbing for the first excuse that comes to mind. “I’ll be right back. I’m only going for food.” 

It’s a good excuse, and even a good reason--what alpha _wouldn’t_ do that for an omega they’d partnered?--but in retrospect, perhaps a mistake. It wrings at her heart like one, at least. Steve makes a sleepy noise and lets her go without comment, though, and that was all she’d wanted. 

She slips off the bed and starts looking for something to wear, internally praying for an alternative to the terrible pantsuit. She’ll go out in Barnes’s discarded hospital gown if she has to, she isn’t above it. Hell, she’d wear his _panties_ if she had to, if they weren’t absolutely filthy. Possibly even though they are, because absolutely anything would be better than the pantsuit. 

Lord, she despises that pantsuit. 

She finds a robe in the cabinets, mercifully, and while it’s clearly intended to fit someone closer to Barnes’s size than hers, it’s certainly good enough for government work. She ties it on and moves over to the mirror to fix her hair into something like presentability, which would be easier if she could figure out where the pins were and if her makeup weren’t _still_ perfect, which . . . what. How. _Why?_

 _Children,_ she thinks in exasperation, giving up on her hair as a lost cause. 

“I’ll be back shortly,” she says. Steve hums sleepily at her but she heads out into the hall without looking back at either him or Barnes. She knows exactly what they look like right now anyway. 

It occurs to her, belatedly, that there’s no lock on Barnes’s door. The brief rush of relief she feels startles her, considering it hardly matters at this point anyway. It’s there all the same, though. 

Finding the kitchens is harder than finding the robe was, but it’s still an uncomplicated process. She searches like she’s always searched unfamiliar territory, with the exception of not sweeping every new room or hall for hostiles. And she’s unarmed this time, of course. 

She’s wishing a bit that she weren’t, if only because this young body can’t help but notice the lack of a weapon; if only because she feels like she should be preparing to chase off strangers and unwelcome interlopers drawn by Barnes’s heat-scent. Barnes doesn’t even _have_ enough of a heat-scent for that at the moment, but she still feels it. 

She wishes she’d thought to scent the doorframe on the way out. It would’ve been--

The kitchens are not empty. 

“Ah,” the omega girl perched on the counter says, tensing in surprise. The Scarlet Witch--Wanda Maximoff. She’s wearing black stockings and a fitted black coat and a distressed red denim dress. The Vision is standing in front of her. Very close in front of her. He--it? they?--does not step back upon being observed. “You are not with the sergeant?” 

“Food,” Peggy says, lacking anything better to say to the apparent builders of her false body. “He’s between spikes.” 

“You smell like--” Maximoff cuts herself off with a wince. “Well. You would know what you smell like.” 

“Yes, I would,” Peggy replies shortly, drawing herself up. She wouldn’t be so terse with an omega, usually, nor even with a null, but face-to-face with the pair of them all she’s thinking about is whatever occurred in the instant between falling asleep as a feeble old creature in her bed in DC and waking up young and _burning_ here in Steve Rogers’s arms. 

What a vicious thing to do to a person, she thinks. 

“Did you think I’d smell any other way?” she asks, because really, in what world _would_ she have? In what place would it have been different from this? 

“He said he would stand guard,” Maximoff says, her eyes slanting to the Vision. “He did not say anything else.” 

“That does sound like one of his foolish ideas,” Peggy snorts, shaking her head. Clearly these two haven’t spent nearly enough time with Steve to know better than to let him take care of his own emotional health. She can only hope whoever’s taking care of his heats is--

A thought occurs to her, and she pauses. Steve is on suppressants. He hadn’t been knotted before this. And unreliable mind or not, she can’t remember smelling pre-heat on him any of the times he’s visited her in the home, not even once. 

Has he even let himself _have_ a heat since coming up from the ice? 

No, what is she saying--of course he hasn’t. 

“We felt the need to respect his choice,” the Vision says. Peggy laughs. It’s _cruel_ , hearing that. Not cruel of the Vision, the Vision wouldn’t know, but--

Yes. Cruel of _something_ , for certain. 

“How long do I have?” she asks, ignoring the rest of it. There’s little point to the rest of it anyway. Not for her. 

“How long do you--have?” Maximoff repeats, sounding confused. The Vision’s head tilts questioningly. 

_“This,”_ Peggy says in exasperation, gesturing to herself. What else would she possibly mean? “It’s obviously not real. For God’s sake, I just knotted two super-soldiers and my _eyeliner_ isn’t even smudged. I have, in fact, _genuinely_ lost track of how many orgasms have been involved in this evening, which I must admit is not an experience I’ve had often.” 

“Don’t the orgasms only happen once?” the Vision asks, appearing genuinely curious. Maximoff turns red, mouth opening and closing helplessly a few times before she visibly gives up. 

“No, it is, uh--that is, we thought you would have trouble satisfying Sergeant Barnes without upgrades,” she says quickly instead of answering that. “And because it was for Sergeant Barnes, and because of how close you were to Project Rebirth in the beginning . . . well, that was easiest. And seemed most useful, honestly.” 

“You made me a body with the _serum_ in it,” Peggy says before the realization can even properly sink in. The white-hot fury in her mind is--well, “white-hot” is barely enough to describe it. 

Or maybe it’s just cold enough to burn. 

“You were there,” the Vision says, head inclining in acknowledgement. “The situation could have gone differently.” 

“Easily,” Maximoff agrees with a nod, holding up a hand with a gentle curl of red light blossoming inside it. “Probabilities that are that _probable_ are nothing to create.” 

“The files said you were a telekinetic,” Peggy says. Her head is all fire and fury, ice and agony. She feels like Howard has brought her another murderous little miracle without understanding why the rest of the room’s recoiled. 

“Yes, I am sure HYDRA’s files on my abilities are very accurate,” the murderous little miracle says, picking at a loose thread on the hem of her dress. Her nail polish is chipped, unlike Peggy’s, and her expression is distant. “Certainly the probability that they would not be is very, very low.” 

“Perhaps it was a little more than ‘nothing’,” the Vision says as Peggy’s still struggling to figure out how to react to that--to _anything_ in this conversation, at this point. “Nonetheless, we were capable of it. So we did it.” 

“Lord,” Peggy laughs uselessly, shaking her head. “You _are_ young.” 

“Yes,” the Vision agrees, giving her a curious look. Peggy laughs again. The sound isn’t pleasant. 

“Fine,” she says. “You still haven’t answered me. How long until I turn back?” 

They don’t answer her. 

Something strange and painful clenches in Peggy’s gut. 

_“How long,”_ she repeats, teeth baring like it wasn’t safe to let them do around Steve and Barnes, but for nothing like the same reasons. Maximoff and the Vision give each other helpless looks, then look back to her. 

“Why _would_ you?” the Vision asks with obvious bemusement. 

Peggy wonders exactly what this null and omega have been told about bodily autonomy. Peggy wonders what Gabe would’ve done. If Steve and Barnes are still asleep. If she should kill these two or _cry_. 

“It’s not my body,” she says. 

“It’s your body,” Maximoff says, still picking at the same stray thread. “Just if something different had happened to it.” 

Peggy laughs again, helpless and useless. Maximoff looks uneasy, and the Vision frowns in confusion. 

“Food,” Peggy says again, because there’s still no better option. She walks past them to the cupboards and takes every heat snack she can carry--so many, it turns out, just about _all_ of them, it turns out--and two gallons of water out of the back of the fridge, both handles held easily in one hand. 

This morning she couldn’t hold her own _glass_. 

“Did we do something wrong?” the Vision asks. The question is so . . . _childish_. 

“I have no idea,” Peggy answers, thinking of Gabe in the cold ground; thinking of Steve and Barnes tangled together in a warm bed. Thinking of the energy and intensity in this body, the endurance, the _strength_ . . . 

Thinking of the reason she would’ve asked for this body, if she’d ever asked. 

And of the reason she was _given_ this body. 

It’s much too much to think about in front of strangers while wearing a borrowed robe and body. Except it isn’t quite so “borrowed” as she’d thought, apparently. 

Fuck it. She’s keeping the damn robe too. 

Peggy leaves without preamble or goodbyes, taking the food and water with her and pretending her memory of the way back isn’t photo-perfect in her mind. She wonders if they’d told Steve it was permanent. She wonders if that will mean something to him. Of course it will, she knows, just . . . 

She wants to know _what_ it will mean to him, she supposes. What he’ll want, and what he won’t want; what Barnes will and won’t remember of her when he has his next episode, or if perhaps his version of the serum has already dealt with that and he’ll never have another again, or if she’ll open the door and find him hollow-eyed and blank-faced again, find him--

Laughing? 

Peggy pauses in the hall just outside the door to Barnes’s room and hears--

“Steve, Steve, _Stevie_ , c’mere you little bastard, c’mon,” Barnes croons teasingly. Steve snorts; the bed creaks. 

“Why don’t you come _here_ ,” he retorts dryly. 

“Don’t mind if I do,” Barnes purrs over the soft sound of impact--as if he’s dropped back against the bed or tackled Steve to the mattress. Steve’s laugh is breathless, so Peggy’s going to assume it was the latter. Listening to them like this is painful, which isn’t a surprise, but the particular _quality_ of the pain is. There was a countdown in her head going until this body ran out, except this body didn’t come with the expiration date she’d expected and now she doesn’t know _what_ she’s counting down to. 

She’d assumed she’d lose them again--assumed that she will always lose them--and she doesn’t know what to do with the idea that she might not have to. 

It’s not as if it’s the first time she’s found out something hurtful didn’t hurt how she’d thought it would, though. And loathe though she is to turn her own words back on herself, sometimes the best one can do really is start over. 

Or at least, start again. 

“You’re both ridiculous,” she informs them as she steps back into the room, and they both look up at her from the gorgeous tangle that is their bodies on the bed and _God_ , it’s been a long, long time since anyone smiled that bright to see her. 

They don’t even look sad underneath it. 

“Peggy,” Steve says, long-lost to her and lovelier than she’d even remembered, if she’d been able to trust her memory by the time he’d been found. 

“Carter,” Barnes says, even longer-lost and not _hers_ , not even for the last kiss before dying, but still someone who’d put faith in her and trusted her to deserve it. 

“So I am,” Peggy agrees, and goes to them. She imagines, for a moment, that she always will. Perhaps now she even might. 

She sets the food and water down on the table next to the bed and Barnes makes a soft, pleased noise and leans up beseechingly. She kisses him, because of course she kisses him, and Steve watches them kiss because of course he watches them kiss. And then they both kiss him too, because the damn fool would never ask for what he wants. 

This is what this body was made for. Not what she would’ve asked for it for. 

But to herself, at least, she can admit that she would never have asked for what she wanted either. 

“Darling,” she says, very aware of her teeth and all the places they could bite, now. 

It doesn’t matter which one of them she’s talking to; they both lean in. And Peggy--

Peggy does the best she can do.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr!](http://suzukiblu.tumblr.com/) ❤


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